Might as Well be Spring

I'm Canadian. We are a people of a strong, contrasting climate. In Manitoba, summer is usually warm-to-hot, with occasional rain. Fall is crisp and cool, or soggy and cool, and leaves change colour and fall off the trees. Birds migrate south. It starts to freeze. Often, we have snow by Halloween. By November, it's really really cold, especially at night. Winter is long, really cold, and snowy. The days, while often blindingly bright, are cold and short. Spring, when it comes, marks a huge contrast to the winter that went before. Suddenly, everything is melting, and earth and branches that were black and dun have turned a pale green with new buds. European and North American holidays reflect the changing seasons; Christmas and Hannukah, falling at the winter solstice, celebrate light in the darkness, Easter celebrates rebirth and renewal in the spring, and Thanksgiving celebrates the harvest in the fall. This is why Canadian Thanksgiving happens more than a month before American Thanksgiving does - our fall comes earlier, generally. For a Canadian, the mere words "September" and "October" conjure up images of autumn leaves, ripe apples, fresh school supplies, steaming ciders, hearty pies, pumpkins and Halloween costumes. It is nigh impossible to separate the notion of fall from the months of September and October, even when one is on the other side of the equator, where these months in fact represent spring. Sort of.

Peru, even southern Peru, is much closer to the equator than Canada is. We are currently about as far south of the equator as, say, the Caribbean is north of it. To get anything approaching the kind of weather changes we see in Canada while in South America, I would presumably have to go to Patagonia, in the south of Argentina. And even then, the climate is so different due to other factors, that it really wouldn't compare. So, I might be more likely to consider it spring now, and get over my fall feelings, if we were moving out of a wintry spell into a warmer, wetter, more springy season. But as far as I can tell, spring in Arequipa mostly means that the days feel a great deal hotter than they were in winter, and the sun rises earlier and sets later - but not by a whole lot - and as the time since the last rainfall grows greater and greater, the amount of dust in the air increases. I said the days feel hotter, even though the highs remain within a degree of each other. I think it's because it doesn't get as cold at night now. And the direct sun is incredibly strong. In theory, we are experiencing greater humidity than before, which is only evidenced in a slight increase in the number of clouds, from zero to a scattered few, and a bit more haze between us and the mountains. So, spring here means hotter, hazier, dustier, and slightly longer days. There was that one cloudy day, too. Nevertheless, the winter turtlenecks, coats and boots have given way to spring fashions - sandals, sundresses, shorts - as the temperatures have climbed from highs of 21 and lows of 2 to highs of 22 and lows of 8.

Spring is nearly over here, I suppose, and summer on its way in. However, if we assume a summer of November-March - five months - the climate changes rather abruptly smack in the middle, in January/February. It almost never rains before early December, and then very little, although the daytime highs climb past 25 degrees. The temperature begins to "drop" down to 21 or so in the latter half of January, and sporadic rain continues. Real rain doesn't come until February. As far as I can see, February is far and away the rainiest month here. Fall isn't really considered to be in full swing till the rains have gone, which is mid-March. So, in contrast to Canadian conceptions of seasons, which come and go as indicated by the changes in the weather, it seems that Peruvian seasons really go by the calendar months, and the biggest climatic shift of the year happens mid-summer.

Some years are far wetter than others; we came in a particularly wet February.

I'm not likely to see rain till we leave Peru. So sad. A few weeks ago, when it got all cloudy that one day, I kept walking around singing, "God said to Noah, 'There's gonna be a floody, floody!'" But nothing happened. Now the forecast is predicting cloudy weather this Friday and Saturday, but rain is highly unlikely.

It doesn't feel like any spring I can relate to. So, my mind keeps circling back to fall in Canada, with the result that my Peruvian friends are now acquainted with pumpkin pie, apple spice muffins, and a wide assortment of autumnal comfort foods. The notion of Thanksgiving dinner is nearly nonsensical in a country where there are three crops a year, where the ground never freezes, where there's no point to preserving food through canning or pickling.

I really miss fall. And spring, for that matter. I figure I have no cause to miss winter, since I'll be getting my fill of it two months from now.