Seasonality

Seasonality, with all its quirks and ticklish surprises, is stitched deeply into this rural, North Country existence that Susan and I chose when we decided to make Rosslyn our home in the summer of 2006.

On the Adirondack Coast, seasonality’s calendar doesn’t live in our phones — it ripens in our vegetable garden, flashes crimson on a maple leaf, drifts across a snowy meadow, and honks high overhead as Canada Geese fly north. Brush hogging Rosslyn’s backland, sailing and wakesurfing on Lake Champlain, harvesting apples, and cross-country skiing across Library Brook mark time more meaningfully, more meditatively than any clock. These are the punctuation marks in our poetics of place, each an invitation to pause and wonder, to sing and dance a rhythm older than memory.

Seasonality from Boardroom to Bedroom

The word seasonality gets tossed around in boardrooms and medical journals, as if it were only a charmless chart of peaks and valleys, a tidy forecast of things to come. But at Rosslyn, seasonality isn’t charmless or tidy. It’s the fleeting flirtation of green between snow melt and mud season, strawberries half eaten by squirrels and rabbits the moment they ripen, the almost palpable ache of the autumn cricket’s song. Patterns, like moods or milestones, arrive *almost* predictably, playful variations on a theme.

Yielding to Seasonality’s Rhythm

When Susan and I traded Manhattan for Essex, we weren’t just moving north or running away from the city. We were adopting (and adapting to) the art of slow living, though we didn’t understand that at first. Days unfurled differently at Rosslyn. Sun and snow, mist and rain, springtime and autumn were vibrant characters in a drama that we were writing as we lived it. The acidic sweetness of the first cherry tomato of the season bursting in my mouth. The melancholy setting sun, as anemic as a dried white poppy, falling earthward behind bare branches. Seasonality reinvigorated our curiosity, and moment-by-moment, season-by-season it reintroduced us to ourselves.