Stick Season, Mud Season, and Other Reasons We Should Hibernate

You’re listening to A Way with Words, the show about language and how we use it. I’m Grant Barrett.

And I’m Martha Barnette. Grant, we’ve gotten a lot of reaction to our conversation with Haley.

She’s the poet in Minnesota who wondered if there weren’t more terms for the seasons than just winter, spring, summer, and fall. The times between the seasons where something weather-wise is happening, but it doesn’t really fit the other categories. And it turns out that there are lots terms for those mini seasons. We heard from David Alice in Burlington, Vermont, who says in his state they also have something called stick season. And stick season is once the leaves have all fallen and there’s no snow on the ground yet, typically in November. David says, I suppose because autumn is so spectacular here, that it’s quite the contrast when the leaves are suddenly down. The forests look like big sticks. And he says he’d never heard of that until he moved to Vermont.

And we also heard from Linda Lavalette, who lives in rural upper Michigan, and she said we refer to the time between winter and spring as mud season.

We heard that from more than a few listeners. Mud season is very popular around the country. I don’t think they throw parties, and they don’t look forward to it.

No, not at all. And it reminds me that in Old English, before we started using the term February for that second month of the year, there was the term Salmonoth, which may mean mud month, which makes a lot of sense.

Yeah, at least in the northern hemisphere, mud month. Oh, this is good.

What do you call the other seasons of the year? Not winter, spring, summer, fall, or autumn, but the times in between.

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