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Have the seasons changed, or have I?


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Dodge City Daily Globe Columnist
Posted Jun 12, 2009 @ 12:00 PM
Last update Jun 16, 2009 @ 10:12 AM

DODGE CITY —

What I remember most about the seasons when I was a child is that they were different than they are now.
    I don’t mean they weren’t what they are now. Spring is spring, summer is summer and the feel of fall and winter are just as uncomfortable as they always were, but they seem to have shifted into a different schedule. Back then, spring arrived about the same time the robins started showing up out on the front lawn. The melted snow and room-temperature air had already started turning the grass green and had also lured the big fat juicy worms to the surface. Now, in the past few years, it's not been at all surprising to see the robins hopping about in snow up to their tail feathers, looking for something to eat in the frozen food section.
    It is, now at this very moment, June, and according to the calendar, spring has sprung. That was back in March. April, the month that has always watered Mother Nature’s gardens, nurturing the seeds into blossoms of royal splendor and providing the giant lawns of wheat with the strength to rise toward the sun and receive its golden color, was blowing things around like it was March, while the “April showers,” after trying to do their thing, had apparently been blown to May and now.
    I remember as a boy, my grandfather’s wheat trucks bouncing in and swaying out of the crisp dusty late-June and early July fields of golden wheat. The moisture in those fields was left over from the April showers and was down deep in the sub-soil around the roots, eliminating any further need for rain. Hub-deep muddy wheat fields in which to get stuck at harvest time were, at least in my memory, a rare hindrance.  But for several years now, the wheat trucks have had to wait for the July sun to dry up the rains that came in late May and early June, sometimes making access into the fields for harvest uncomfortably late.
    And I don’t recall, as a kid, wearing a coat in April; maybe a light jacket over my long-sleeve shirt, but never a fur-lined, hooded, zipped-up-to-your-chin-so-you-won’t-freeze-to-death coat. But then being a kid, maybe I just didn’t have the sense to wear a coat in April, it being so close to summer.
    So now I have to ask myself, "Is it the seasons, or is it just me?" After all, I was just a kid. I was not tuned in to those months in which there was school to go to and snow to scoop and therefore did not absorb any details pertaining to their comings and goings. My memory could be a bit lopsided, leaning more toward the good ol’ summer times than the bad ol’ winter times, causing inaccuracies in the data of my prejudiced account of the seasons’ schedules.
    Maybe it is I who have changed, not the seasons. Having rearranged my priorities to cater to the discomfort of the old man that I have become, perhaps the kid in me has relinquished his memories of long, warm, soul-hugging, months of summer days to the frost creeping up into my old bones. Maybe it is the changing of the seasons in me that has me wondering what happened to the old days of April and May.

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