Things I miss in Colombia: Seasons!
One of the strangest parts about living on the Caribbean coast, so close to the equator, is not having seasons. The chief issue here, for a former maple-everything lover, is missing fall. I love...everything about fall. The drawback of course, is the winter that follows, since extreme cold is only sometimes my thing (snow fights and ski hills and snow-plastered forests = awesome, icy streets and missing fruit short days and having to dig out cars = ...not awesome)
Some of the most fun classroom discussions I have with my students is about seasons. Imagine never experiencing a time when something isn't growing. Imagine never experiencing trees without leaves. Or shortening and lengthening days. Or extreme weather differences. I hear that might be a thing on the US west coast, at least in terms of the food...but since I'm from Wisconsin, I plead ignorance.
My students and I sometimes do seasonal food mapping, and they teach me about the times of different fruits, like mango time, June-July, when trees drop almost a hundred fruit a day (Friendly PCV Jessica is lucky enough to have one in her yard, so I've witnessed this. Mangos EVERYWHERE!). Then there are the times of guanabana, guayaba, ciduela and more, when these fruits become, for a time, crazy-ubiquitous. We're not talking just local farms dropping these fruits, but trees on every street corner of the city. (Of course, the street vendors mostly score them in the early morning hours and sell them back to city dwellers, sometimes pre-chopped, for the rest of the day...)
I'm lucky enough to have scored a lime tree at my house--these trees have fruit all year long(!) The limes here are about the size of a ping pong ball or smaller. Nothing like squeezing 10 or so to spice up black beans or roasted garlic hummus...oh wait, that goes on a different blog. Anyway. The point is, the idea of times of a year where there is NO growth, not just different growth, is completely foreign. One of these days I'll bring in Laura Ingalls Wilder excerpts to the classroom. Nothing like The Long Winter to drive that point home...Digressing again. But boy did I love those books growing up/still do...
And of course, my students and I talk about snow.
Things I don't miss: having limbs so cold they turn white, jumping up and down in pain when blood returns to fingers, snot freezing on my nostrils just walking outside...sometimes, when I'm sweating gallons of salty liquid doing nothing more than sitting at our kitchen table, I think to capture the moment, to save it up for times when I'm miserable from cold and will want to think back to such "glorious" warmth. Grass is always greener, I taunt myself. It gets me through the days and nights, imagining that one day I may be nostalgic for it. Hah.
Anyway, this may or may not have all been a lead up to put my most recent GoGirl post up. Six months of writing with them, woot!
Also, Monday = Vacation time in the cooler interior, double woot!!! Updates on that in a few weeks.
On loving fall: http://www.travelgogirl.com/2012/09/20/missing-seasons/
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