There is a week every year when I cannot decide which season we are in. The calendar says autumn. The thermometer says something else entirely. The garden, meanwhile, operates on its own schedule — leaves falling while new shoots appear, frost on the grass one morning and warmth the next. I find this ambiguity comforting in a way I cannot fully explain.
We like clean transitions. First day of spring. Last day of summer. We mark them on walls and in planners as if nature respects our organizational systems. It doesn't. Seasons bleed into each other like watercolors left too close on a table. You can see where one ended and another began if you squint, but the edges are never sharp.
I noticed this most clearly last November, standing at the kitchen window with tea going cold. The maple tree was half bare, half stubbornly holding its remaining leaves as if auditioning for a role in a different month. Below it, the crocus bulbs I had planted in a fit of optimism were already pushing through soil that should have been too cold for them. The garden was confused, or perhaps I was confused and the garden was simply being honest about its uncertainty.
Small changes accumulate during these in-between weeks. The light shifts by minutes each day — not enough to register consciously, but enough that one afternoon you realize you need a lamp earlier than you did the week before. The birds change their songs. The insects disappear or reappear according to logic I don't understand. The air smells different. Not better or worse. Just different.
I used to find these transitions unsettling. They reminded me that stability is an illusion we maintain through repetition and denial. Now I think they might be the most honest weeks of the year. They refuse the narrative of clean beginnings and endings. They say: change is continuous. You are always between something and something else.
The backyard reflects this truth without commentary. The lawn is brown in patches and green in others. The perennial beds contain both dying stems and emerging growth. The wooden bench — always the bench — sits in light that feels neither summer nor winter but some third thing, some quality of illumination that exists only in transition.
I walked outside that November afternoon without a jacket, which was a mistake, and stood in the middle of the yard doing nothing useful. The cold came gradually, not all at once. First my hands, then my ears, then the particular ache in my shoulders that tells me I should go inside. I stayed anyway. There is something about being slightly uncomfortable outdoors that clarifies thought. You cannot drift. You must decide: stay or leave.
I stayed until the light began to fail. Not dramatically — this was not a sunset worth photographing — but enough that the garden took on the flat, honest quality of dusk. Colors muted. Edges softened. Everything looked like a memory of itself, which perhaps is what in-between seasons always are: memories of what was overlapping with anticipations of what might be.
When I finally went inside, I wrote a note on the back of an envelope: "The garden is between seasons. So am I." It seemed true at the time. It still seems true. We are always between seasons, between versions of ourselves, between the life we planned and the life that actually arrived. The garden does not resolve this tension. It simply continues, adjusting to temperature and rainfall and the slow turning of the earth, indifferent to our need for categories.
I think about this when people ask what my favorite season is. The question assumes seasons are distinct, comparable, choosable. I no longer have an answer. I have preferences for certain qualities — long evenings, the first green, the hush after snow — but those qualities appear and disappear on their own schedule, borrowing from neighboring months, refusing to stay in their assigned boxes.
Small changes between seasons. That is the phrase I keep returning to. Not dramatic transformations. Not the kind you write about in annual summaries. Just the quiet adjustments — a leaf falling, a bulb emerging, a shift in light that you feel before you see. The garden teaches this if you let it: that life is mostly transition, and the transitions themselves are worth noticing.