“How the scent of dry leaves mingles with warm lanterns” Kristen Lawrence, A Broom
with a View
I miss New England.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m happier in NYC than anywhere else, but here in
NYC we don’t really get seasons anymore.
New Yorkers who were whelped further south complain about the bitter
cold of our winters, but a NYC winter is just an especially wet New England
spring. If we do get the blessing of snow,
it’s quickly salted and plowed out of existence, with a survivor or two in
shadowed corners defecated on by rats and dogs until it becomes the same
uniform grey as the rest of the metropolis.
New York City, by virtue of its cozy coastal location in the crook of
New England’s arm, is a completely different climate than even a few minutes
north. New York City is actually
classified as a
Cfa
or humid subtropical climate, putting us it under the same weighted blanket as everything
from Northern Florida to Virginia. The
real cost of all of this, though, is not the beauty of the Winter, but the
beauty of Autumn.
Also known as the boring-but-still-not-comfortable-climate
Autumn is the best season, but in NYC not only do we
have an annoyingly warmer Fall than the surrounding areas, but all our trees survive
in—well—not the best soil or the healthiest air in the world. Leaves usually fall half-green and spotted
with brown like some blight has come upon them.
Oh, the birch trees in Bryant park make a half-hearted attempt at a
yellow that almost—but not quite—manages to avoid looking sickly, but when
the wind plays with their leaves, it always scoops up a devil dog
wrappers and plastic grocery bags in the mix, spoiling the effect. The occasional falling chestnut or crabapple,
instead of releasing the delightful mixed perfumes of harvest, rot on the
ground under a layer of cat pee. It
really is a tragic missed opportunity for beauty, but such is the price of eight million people—not all of whom have seen Captain Planet—squeezing themselves
into a few dozen kilometers.
"Seriously, the trash can is, like, right there"--Captain Planet and the NYC Parks Department (probably)
Image Credit: https://www.pantograph-punch.com/system/posts/images/000/001/449/l/captain-planet.jpg?1562709262
Seasonality is important.
While every place on earth does not enjoy the seasons I grew up with,
every place on earth has seasons. Even
the equatorial regions have their dry and wet seasons. There is something in the human soul that
cries out when deprived of the variety. I have an idle theory as to why: perpetual
temporal existence is not worth living.
Allow me to explain: One day we will be with God in
heaven. We will BE eternally, outside of
space and time. As such, our current
temporal state is a very difficult things for us to wrap our souls around. Without markers of the year—seasons,
birthdays, holidays, feasts, fasts, day, night, weekends, weekdays—it is
difficult to remember that time is passing. When we remove these markers from our lives,
say by living in an ugly, gray, climate-controlled city for the love of
theatre, we lose these reference points which tell us we are approaching
heaven. Yet we are not yet that
perfected self in the perfected presence of God in perfect love and perfect
bliss. We are essentially “stuck” in
perpetuity without that perfect vision.
In short, we are in Hell. But if
leaves follow snow follow flowers follow thunderstorms, then time is passing. We are moving towards a perfect eternity
rather than stuck in an imperfect one.
In Halloween, we see this price reflected in the vampire. As a good friend
once explained to me, vampires are mythological stand-ins for demons: they can’t
come in unless you let them, and they can’t survive in light. They are essentially in the eternal night of Hell--no birds singing in the trees in the morning, no cicadas chirping at night,
not even a glace in the mirror to show that time is passing on their own faces.
"Come on, sister. These vampires aren't going to stake themselves."
Moving to New York City, I get a small taste of this vampire
lifestyle. In the winter, I get to an
office before the sun comes up and leave after its gone down. I live a block from the subway, so I barely have
to feel the wind before I enter the stinking, sweating coffin of a subway
car. I’ve even stopped aging; all my
friends in the suburbs have those standard markers of adulthood—kids,
spouse, car, house. I walk the earth at
night unchanged. Okay, perhaps I am being a bit melodramatic, but you get the idea.
Don’t get me wrong; I hate farm work and am much happier
being an office drone than I was plucking a turkey with needle nose pliers before dinner. I’m not advocating a return to the soil for
all of humanity. I’m merely warning that we are starving ourselves of something in our temperature-controlled
urban lives. Even my dear grandfather,
who has been a farmer his whole life, cannot get relief in what used to be a farmer’s
slower season—winter. The need for year-round
planting and harvesting means that he has to keep plants alive in the New
England winter, which means greenhouses, which means acres of temperamental
furnaces. Up until the age of 80 you
could find him on all fours with a wrench on a January midnight, cursing the
demons clogging the fuel line. October
31st was a time to see if the bank account balance could handle
another winter of buying oil, not a time to settle in for 4 months of easier work. This is modern life,
and for all the blessings it provides, we still suffer for it.
Our rescue is the
Church liturgical calendar, which
provides more-than-abundant opportunities for seasonal themed revelry.
We make evergreen wreaths in advent,
decorate the Easter alter in lilies, crown Mary with flowers in May.
Image credit: https://www.ihmlansing.org/media/1/liturgical%20calendar%20sidebar.png
However, most Catholics stopped following the seasonal
practices that happen June-October.
They
exist, but for whatever reason they slowly fell by the wayside.
This, I suspect, is a large reason for the
rise of neopaganism in recent centuries.
The Great Wheel of the Year has 8 evenly
spaced holidays, 4 on the solstices/equinoxes and 4 in-between.
Meanwhile, we Catholics have been slacking.
I’ve never, for example, jumped over a bonfire on
St. John’s Eve or held a miracle pageant on
Corpus Christi.
Now, as a Catholic I am NOT in any way, shape, or form promoting
a polytheistic, animistic, or pantheistic worldview; nor am I advocating that
any Christian start celebrating Samhain or Beltane.
However, the Great Wheel of the Year—
modern invention or not—fills an emotional gap left by the abandonment of
Christianity’s seasonal externals. (Neopagans often argue that these seasonal
externals originally came from European paganism on the first place, but the
scholarship on this tends to be outdated or
dubious. We have very little reliable information on Celtic
religious practices before Christianity.
Sorry neopagan readers;
The Golden Bough was an entertaining book, but
in terms of scholarship it is on par with the
The DaVinci Code.)
I would argue that a desire for seasonality is one of
the principle appeals of Halloween.
I need it the more I grow disconnected from the seasons. If I can’t have
"worlds of wanwood leafmeal” and
“fresh firecoal chestnutfalls,” I’ll at least decorate a pumpkin.
If I’m afraid that will attract the roaches, I’ll head to the dollar
store for fake leaves and some pumpkin window stickers. Because time is passing, and embracing that passing is the best way to savor it.
