More than Four Seasons

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Haley. How are you guys today?

All right. How about you?

We’re great. What’s up?

I’m calling from the Twin Cities, but I didn’t grow up here. I grew up in Kansas City, and then I moved to Minnesota as an adult. So now I tend not to notice the differences between these two places as much as I did, because I feel pretty well acclimated to the Minnesota way of things.

However, in the last two years with quarantines and isolation and working from home, I’ve just been looking out my window a lot more and spending more time outside. And I’m a poet, so I often notice little possibilities in language. And in the last two years, I really have started wondering about the season.

It’s very clear in Kansas what the four seasons are, or at least it seems that way to me as a child. In Minnesota, I’m really seeing that there might be more than four seasons. And so I’m starting to wonder about these possible transition seasons, especially around winter, because you may have heard of the six-month winter we have up here. But it does seem like maybe there’s more variation in the other seasons, too.

And so I started to wonder, and I knew that you guys would know or at least be able to find out for me if there are other cultures that have other names for seasons that I’ve never thought of before, or maybe even further back in history, there have been more seasons that the English language has named. So I’m just really curious to hear what you guys know about this.

Haley, I’ll tell you what springs to mind immediately for me. And this is something that I learned from our listeners in Fairbanks, Alaska, even farther north. You know, they have lots of seasons there. And the one that they taught me about was breakup. It’s breakup season. And that’s not when you when you suddenly have a new ex. Breakup season is in April and May, and that’s when the snow melts. And people actually wear breakup boots, which are rubberized boots because you’ve got so much mess, you know, from the snow melting.

There’s breakup and then there’s green up, which happens early to mid-May.

And that’s just this sudden explosion of green.

They get really excited talking about that in Alaska.

So you have breakup and green up and then you go through several other seasons like early summer, high summer, fall, early winter, solstice season, high winter, springtime winter.

And then you’re back to breakup, which was a revelation for me because I tell you, Grant and I both live here in sunny San Diego and there used to be a meteorologist on TV.

And his little saying was, our spring is in the summer, our summer is in the fall, our fall is in the winter and our winter is not at all.

Oh, I love that.

But Haley, there are also, particularly for the English-speaking countries in the Northern Hemisphere,

There are also a lot of terms for a period of cold or harsh weather that comes after the first period of pleasant spring weather.

You know, you get that first warm week or few days and you think, this is it.

We’ve arrived. Put the sweaters away. Get out the shorts.

And then you get like a cold storm or more frost or more snow.

And there’s so many terms for this.

And almost all of them have to do with that the cold weather comes after something has appeared because it’s spring.

For example, dogwood winter is a term for that.

It comes after the dogwoods blossom or bloom winter, after the blooms of a variety of plants.

And there’s fox grape winter, blackbird storm, buzzard storm, oak winter, whippoorwill storm, redwood or redbud winter, onion snow, and frog storm.

It’s not something biblical.

It’s just after the frogs have come out of their hibernation.

And one more, which I love, is snowball winter, but it has nothing at all to do with snow.

It’s about viburnum, the snowball bushes.

They have these big clusters of white flowers, white blossoms that look kind of like snowballs.

And as a child, my brother and I used to lie underneath the viburnum bushes in the yard,

Much to my mother’s anger, and just rattle them so that the petals would flutter down on us like snowflakes.

So there’s a ton of these.

There’s even, you know, blackberry storms, blackberry winter.

And these are in May and June when the blackberries bloom.

And then in the UK, there’s blackthorn winter.

Blackthorn is a hedgerow shrub.

I don’t know if you’ve heard of it.

It’s got white flowers that blossom in March or April.

And that blackthorn winter has a corresponding term in a lot of European cultures and languages because it happens, you know, blackthorn is spread throughout Europe.

There’s so many of these.

And there’s more.

I mean, how much more do you want?

Yeah, do we hear you taking notes there?

You do, actually.

I’m like, oh, that’s a good one.

I’m going to do that.

Maybe I’ll just send you my notes, Haley.

That’d be fantastic, actually.

Oh, wow.

What I will do is when we post this on the website, we will link to a couple of books.

We’ll mention a couple of books about weather lore.

And they include not only, you know, proverbs and sayings about how to predict the weather, but some of these terms are included in there.

Well, you guys, I am going to make just a list of the ones that you gave me right now.

And for my students, this is going to be an assignment for them that they have to write a poem about one of these seasons.

That sounds fantastic.

So you’ll have lots of poems.

How wonderful.

Yeah.

Yeah, please send us the results.

Absolutely.

For sure.

For sure I will.

All right.

Hayley, good luck.

Send us some of the poems, all right?

Oh, thank you.

I will.

Thank you so much.

Take care now.

Thank you.

Do well.

Thank you.

Bye.

Bye-bye.

What do you call those odd in-between seasons that aren’t quite fall, aren’t quite winter, not spring, not summer?

Maybe it’s a little warmer than it should be or a little colder than it should be or wetter or drier than it ought to be.

We know there’s a term for it where you live, anywhere in the world.

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