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Are the Bulls or the Hawks playing on cable TV tonight? It's this sort of touchstone that marks the progression of the seasons in the Chicago suburbs, along with discovering that the Halloween end-caps at Wal-Mart have given way to Thanksgiving themes, or deciding a steaming Macchiato at Starbucks sounds better than a frosty Frappuccino. Seasonal change, for many suburbanites, has little to do with nature.
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As a transplant here six years ago, I went looking for more meaningful ways to be in touch with the four seasons. "More" has come in walks on a 100-acre reconstructed tallgrass prairie, just down the road from the subdivision where I live. It's planted to represent the original landscape of "The Prairie State," a state that today seems more comfortable with strip malls and highways than anything to do with tallgrass. Yet, just as Chet Raymo found himself following the change of seasons in Massachusetts on his daily one-mile stroll in The Path, so I find the cycle of the seasons unfolding for me as I walk the prairie trails day after day. Spring into summer is marked by the height of the grasses, the type and variety of the wildflower blooms. Fall submerges me in tallgrass, while loose threads of sandhill cranes arrange and rearrange themselves overhead, moving south. In late winter the prairie is torched, accompanied by the drumming of red-bellied woodpeckers. Emerald shoots rapidly fuzz the charred earth, and the cycle begins again. Each season is enough in itself, yet holds the promise of the next.
Precisely because many of us are out of touch with the rhythms of the natural world, we feel nostalgia for what we have lost. In A Time to Every Purpose: The Four Seasons in American Culture, Michael Kammen chronicles the evolution of our love affair with the seasons. A professor of American history and culture at Cornell University, Kammen is the author or editor of more than 20 books, including the Pulitzer Prize-winning People of Paradox: An Inquiry Concerning the Origins of American Civilization. For two decades, he tells us, he has been a collector of all things four-seasonal, and his passion for the subject is well-nigh irresistible.
Kammen invites us to consider how, when our nation was primarily agricultural and our technology not too far advanced from the Roman era, we stayed in touch with the changing of the seasons, keeping an eye out for harbingers of peril. Today, while we're still vulnerable to hurricanes and floods and other such reminders of nature's unpredictable power, we're insulated against the demands of seasonal change. Air-conditioning mitigates the dog days of August. Snowplows clear roads and expedite travel through all but the harshest blizzards of January. We buy strawberries and oranges in November. The rhythms of the seasons are flattened. Kammen quotes Diane Ackerman: "we've worked hard to exile ourselves from nature, yet we end up longing for what we've lost: a sense of connectedness."
The four seasons motif has a rich history. After providing some background on the ancient world's perceptions of the four seasons, Kammen concentrates on the perception and representation of the seasons in America, from the 17th century to the present. During the first two centuries of European experience here, most seasonal rituals and festivals followed the Christian calendar as they had back in Europe. Marriage, followed by childbirth, was often dictated by the seasons, as clergymen could only reach remote communities in the spring and summer.
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