Seasonal fluster

There is a thing that happens to people, or at least to me, when moving to the Southern Hemisphere. Everything seasonal becomes really confusing. It's not too bad on the equator where there are no seasons so you only have half a year of befuddlement but way down here we are flung into a full-on seasonal shift. And it's sort of no big deal. Which is probably why the concept hasn't been deemed important enough to be part of the vernacular. But it creeps up on you at odd times. We have lived our whole lives as slaves to the calendar and programmed to look forward to certain activities in certain months. Sweaters and skiing in January, ice cream cones dripping in August, April showers bring May flowers... And while my brain knows that I have to flip the calendar sometimes it rebels or even worse I often find myself counting months to convert to something my brain can process. June...so this is like December!  I imagine this is a bit how it was to convert to the metric system. I have been searching my brain for the right word to fit seasonal confusion of hemispheres. I think given how common this must be there must already be a word for it. But there doesn't seem to be so it's time someone created one.

 

This internal seasonal conflict really comes across strongly in the case of birthdays. We associate our birth time remarkably with the seasons. Sophia and Tova are winter babies. And we were all really perplexed to celebrate Sophia's birthday picking strawberries and going for a swim. Even she just really wanted to stay inside and decorate cookies. And now as the winter months creep up on us I am realizing that actually Jakob and I will have birthdays in the not too distant future and it shouldn't be surprising but my brain just doesn't agree.  It's a bit like the the internal rebellion that happens with jetlag but in really slow slow motion.

 

And this is just the beginning because we are also thrown into a situation where the seasons are foreign to us. Winter in Canberra is very different from any winter we have experienced before. Yes it is cold and all Australians will tell you Canberra has really bad winters. But actually it is just sort of cold. We wake up to frost and put on our hats but there are colorful parrots in our trees and the temperature creep up to 10 by the afternoon. Friends tell us that it is just going to get worse but there are flowers blooming and the bulbs have begun to grow. I am frantically knitting hats for children while Aurora's classmates come to school in shorts and t-shirts. Sophia put on a sweater, hat and mittens and asked if that is what she wore that many clothes in Montreal winter. We are trapped in an odd winterspring in summer months. Yes we are confused. But no one will give us the word to voice our confusion. 

 

Aurora and Sophia ice skating

This is confusing to me

This too