Waiting Casually

As I’ve stared out at the snow coming down outside my window, I’ve reflected on how Midwesterners benefit from the clear delineation between the seasons out here. The weather is the biggest factor to be sure and gets compounded by what foods and activities become available depending on the weather.

For example, when Fall rolls around, not only do you have the leaves on the trees changing colors and falling in swirls to the ground, but the local foods you see in the stores change to feature more apples, brussels sprouts, and squash, etc. Once you start feeling that crispness in the air, you know you’ll be heading to a newly re-opened cider mill for your cider and doughnuts. Perhaps a hay ride at a pumpkin farm.

As the crispness in the air turns to a true chill and the snow starts really piling up, it’s time to grab your sled and find some good hills.

Similar changes happen in the Spring and Summer (you haven’t seen a happy person until you’ve seen a Midwesterner on the first sunny, fifty degree-plus day of the year). Different foods and different activities. There’s even a beer that only comes out in the Summer months from a local brewer.

And as I was thinking about all of this, I realized that I didn’t have any of those signals when I lived in the Bay Area in California. Or if I did they were much weaker and I really had to look for them. Yes, in Winter we had dungeness crab and other occasional signals, but by and large, our days were temperate and therefore fairly interchangeable. A day at the beach in the summer wasn’t too unlike going to the beach in the winter.

How does that affect a person?

Could the clear delineations between seasons and therefore years in the Midwest contribute to a deeper connection to one’s age? I know that I can more easily detail my age progression of the past three years than that of the years I spent in the Bay Area. Those earlier years just seem to blend all together, but when I think about what I did or how I was in Spring of 2008, I can make that connection fairly easily.

Maybe this explains why the Midwesterners I know (a couple hundred including my coworkers) generally act their age more than the people I know back in California. They seem to act with more responsibility. With more foresight. Is that a product of living in a location that demands real planning for how to handle the various challenges each season brings? Do changing seasons create an increased temporal cognizance?

What about the opposite end? Does the perennial Spring/Summer of the Bay Area’s weather contribute to those stereotypical spritely Californians who continue to rollerblade at the age of 70? Because they don’t have to consider the passing of time in a concrete way, are they less able to see their own progression and therefore do things that an outsider would raise his eyebrows at?

I’ll grant you that there are complicating factors involved. Hell, Steinbeck even wrote about the weirdness of folks who came to the California coast 65 years ago. And the weirdos kept coming. For a time.

But still, you can’t just write these differences off to one group being sensible and one group being weird, right? Our environment affects us as well.