{"id":6940,"date":"2012-12-02T07:58:54","date_gmt":"2012-12-02T12:58:54","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/?p=6940"},"modified":"2012-12-03T09:22:11","modified_gmt":"2012-12-03T14:22:11","slug":"fugue-season","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/2012\/12\/02\/fugue-season\/","title":{"rendered":"Fugue Season"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>

Welcome to Hoth! Time to get the snowblower out! (Source: Star Wars: The Old Republic videogame)<\/p><\/div>\n

In recent decades, Americans have become a summery people, migrating in historic numbers away from cold, snowy, grey-skied places to more “temperate” climes.<\/p>\n

Set aside for a moment the fact that “temperate” usually means beastly, feverishly, shirt-clingingly hot much of the year.\u00a0 (I admit it: really hot weather makes me cranky.)<\/p>\n

And places that are truly “perfect” are generally crowded, or getting crowded\u00a0 (I admit it:\u00a0 crowds in large doses make me even crankier.<\/p>\n

But the real reason I can’t join the flock heading south is seasons.\u00a0 I know it’s sort of trite, but I love the changing year.\u00a0 I love the way the world I live in becomes, in very real ways, a different world every three or four months.<\/p>\n

In geek terms, I get to spend part of each year on Endor and part of it on Naboo.\u00a0 (Go here if you have no idea what I’m talking about.)<\/a><\/p>\n

But my absolute favorite time (or times<\/em>) of year is fugue season.\u00a0 These are the funky weeks when I swim in a lake and ski to toll road at Whiteface.<\/p>\n

Or when — as we did last week — we’re still gleaning fresh vegetables out of the garden, and I’m scrabbling over ice on Ampersand Mountain.<\/p>\n

This physical embodiment of change and time passing captures the weird scales at which our world works.<\/p>\n

We are blessed to exist in a cosmos that functions in geological time, but also in bursts of immediacy.<\/p>\n

I lived for a time in a cabin on the Copper River in Alaska and I remember listening to the ice break-up in spring — it was like artillery fire after the silent expanse of winter.<\/p>\n

The truth, of course, is that it’s always fugue season.\u00a0 We humans are — both individually and collectively — a very small organism living on a planet that is changing all the time, in ways that we influence and ways that we don’t.<\/p>\n

Usually, those tiny, cumulative evolutions are lost to us at our Mayfly scale of blink-and-you-miss-it consciousness.<\/p>\n

But for those of us who live in the North Country, those big changes are visible, at least symbolically, week-by-week.\u00a0 I mean, a few days ago, I woke up and suddenly I was living on Hoth.<\/p>\n

How cool is that?<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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