Spring Bee Hiving Moon
Coon Rapids has 9.0 inches and Ramsey has 8.0. We’re between them so our snowfall must be somewhere in that range. Minnesota’s weather always surprises. I know many people live in areas where the weather changes only from dry to wet, never from hot to cold, but I find that sort of climate just as difficult to imagine as I figure they do ours.
It’s not like I haven’t experienced the sub-tropical, tropical climates. I have. What I can’t imagine is a whole year where the temperature doesn’t change and where one season is dry and the other wet. Living in it, I mean. From my vantage point it appears boring, but I know people adapt to it. Brother Mark and sister Mary both live in climates very different from ours here in Minnesota: Arabia and Singapore respectively.
I don’t know how much of the world’s food production occurs in the temperate latitudes…stopped to look it up. “Most food is produced in the temperate Northern hemisphere, with the US by far the largest total and surplus food producer.” IPCC, 2007 So, while we humans are by body a tropical to sub-tropical species, we are now fed by those regions that have a fallow season as well as a growing season.
This is the world I know best, being a midwesterner by birth and continued residence, changing location only slightly (by global standards) from the lower to the upper midwest. This agricultural area-the heartland of U.S. as well as world food production-is my home. It is no surprise then that the Great Wheel has come into prominence in my way of viewing the world. It is a temperate latitude agriculturally focused calendar, one that weaves together the rhythm of spring emergence, summer growth, fall harvests and the winter’s cold, growthless time into a whole. With the Great Wheel we understand the necessary interlocking components of seasonal change for food production and more, how those components also serve as metaphor for our own lives.
The best thing about the Great Wheel is its insistence on the whole, celebrating the distinct seasonal changes as elements in a cycle, all required. We cannot become summer people, or winter people because we know the summer as the hot, growth enhancing aspect of vegetative growth, not just the time of swimming suits and summer vacation. I suppose this underlies my inability to imagine those other climates. One season, extended, made permanent, upsets the dance. At least from the perspective of those between 30 degrees and 50 degrees north latitude.
