These days we tend to avoid the drastic season. Hopefully, I'm finished with 110 degree days, 15 degree days or nights, tornadoes, hurricanes, Blue Norther's and blizzards. I can remember the relief of moving to central Texas and re-experiencing the four distinct seasons. I think it's the poets who understand the seasons. There are beautiful, thoughtful poems written through the centuries that evoke the seasons with word pictures triggering memories.
After twenty years on the Gulf Coast, the initial novelty of a hot, "green" Christmas in shorts and a t-shirt had long worn off. I always wondered why the Houstonians and New Orleanians didn't demand lines of clothing which were Christmas festive but fabric appropriate for the climate. Instead, the stores were stocked with heavy sweaters, Ho-Ho-Ho sweatshirts and wool plaids tricked out in green and red with a touch of holly. You couldn't wear a single item without turning your a/c down to 60 degrees. Houstonians were not above trying for holiday cheer with a roaring fire in their useless fireplaces while their air conditioners churned out massive amounts of frigid air to make the flickering flames bearable. Even in the 1970's the December electric bill could be gargantuan.
I had a poinsettia bush at my NOLA house that I grew from putting my $4.99 Walmart Christmas plant into the ground around March. It wouldn't die in the house; I should have known it sure wouldn't die outside. New Orleans gardening is a cliche: Stick any plant in the ground and jump back fast before the growth knocks you down. One woman in my neighborhood actually had a six foot Bird of Paradise bush. I was tickled to have my own bush full of bright red poinsettias the following Christmas; it was like putting one over on the commercial Christmas industry. My Sun City house also has a poinsettia bush which made me smile with memory the first time I saw it.
In eight years in New Orleans, there was only one three day period of winter. Normal was all the plants constantly and lushly green. Deciduous trees tended to be Live Oaks. The new leaves just pushed the old ones off the tree in the spring. Other leaves turned from green to brown over the course of three days, fell to the ground, and two weeks later, there were new leave buds ready to pop out. My next door neighbor didn't replant her annuals for three years running because they never stopped blooming. It was unnerving to see blazing zinnias and petunias take a one month rest period in January and start up again.
One of the joys of Fort Worth was the winter. After the modest autumn color and the leaves drifting off the trees, I liked seeing the architecture of trees against the pale blue sky. Winter time in central Texas is short, crisp, and invigorating. I also liked having occasional snow that would be gone within a few days. Central Texans never deal with ugly piled up snow, struggle to get places, clean off cars, or spend 15 minutes dressing a child to 'go play outside'. We get the greeting card version of winter. Sometimes they even cancel school at the last minute for an amount of snow people who experience real winter find laughable. Central Texans consider snow day school cancellation a lottery everyone gets to win.
 Once every five years, there's either an ice storm or a significant snow fall. Ice coats every surface and the severity of the storm determines the depth of the ice. The morning after an ice storm is almost always sunny, and the ice glints off every surface, both man made and natural as if coated with liquid diamonds. The only real winter mishap: Ice is heavy and brings down trees and power lines. Booming shotgun reverberations echo throughout the 'ice day' as branches drop off ice coated trees. I've seen trees with trunk diameters of 20 inches split in half as if attacked by a giant ax so heavy was the weight of ice on their branches.
 Tulsa had 'real' autumn; it's a town of deciduous trees. The short colorful autumn was so familiar I didn't realize how much I would come to miss it. The desire for fall and all the sights and rituals surrounding it fueled our trip to New Hampshire. Other spots around the country have nice color, but New England is the Hollywood of autumn. Other places are amateurville compared to the fall beauty of the Northeast. The tree colors were so rich in an undulating palette I couldn't stop taking pictures.
Spring is a different matter. It's more beautiful on the Gulf Coast because of one plant: Azaleas. You can trick an azalea to sort of grow in Fort Worth, Texas, but it's never really happy. Those pampered, forced azaleas are nothing like the lush shimmering perfection of the two perfect weeks of springtime on the Gulf Coast when the azaleas bloom. Azaleas are cool green hedges bursting with colors of magenta, peppermint pink, white, and lavender. New Orleans has the same lovely hybrid azaleas, but they also have wild azaleas. Wild azaleas have smaller petal pink flowers, and are somewhat vine like. They have a divine fragrance. My favorite Hove perfume (a New Orleans perfumier) has an azalea fragrance, and it smells like the wild flowers. That azalea smell always speaks to me of Spring, and reminds me of my youth.
Spring in Texas also means bluebonnets. If azaleas are the Gulf Coast's spring perfection, the Texas Bluebonnet is the spring flower equivalent of the state song. Bluebonnets are an obsession with Texans.  They memorialize these flowers with pictures, eagerly await their return each year, and speculate on how good or bad the 'season' will be. Bluebonnets are wildflowers, and it's illegal to pick them in Texas. Every bluebonnet season is a crap shoot depending on how wet the previous winter.
Summers are never more perfect than in the Pacific Northwest. For about three months of the year, each day is azure blue skies, bright yellow sunshine, and mild temperatures. Throw in a blue turquoise ocean, backing up to mountains with icy rushing streams and it's completely comprehensible why Northwesterners endure the dismal weather of the fall and winter to experience the vibrancy of summertime. I've never, ever seen more beautiful flowers than are produced up here in the summertime. What will take me back to Northwestern Washington will be the dahlias. What delightful flowers blooming prodigiously and waving in all sizes and colors. Dahlias just perk me right up, and some people grow them and sell them to you. The "Dahlia Lady" outside of Burlington, Washington had one-half acre of flowers she cut and sold for $.20 a stem.
I have a friend who posts poems as part of her 'chat' avatar for perusal by the interested. Once I access a poetry site, I tend to browse and nibble. I was already internally noodling about the idea of seasons when I ran across this poem. Such a fitting ending:
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