Seasonality in Chicago

I have lived in Chicago for 17 years, and I have become accustomed to the seasons here. It is no longer window-plastic season, and I am overjoyed. I just played bass on the porch, and I might do it again in a few minutes. My turtle suns himself in the light streaming through a north-facing window, as do our cats. Houseplants have been redeployed. Most importantly, window plastic is being taken down from the windows, and several of them are already cracked.

Right now, we are in a very short season. Some people might call it "spring", but Chicago experiences nothing of the sort. We are too near the continental interior for this "spring" that Shakespeare experienced. Summer comes in fits and starts-episodes of summerlike weather of increasing duration, punctuated by cold, until summer becomes normative and cold becomes unusual. Right on this cusp between the two, we experience "window-cracked" season. The windows are cracked a bit, ready to be shut at any moment, but the need for extreme measures against high gas bills is over-the damage is done, I will be paying the gas bill down till the process starts again next year.

Soon, it will be "window open all the time" season, roughly what Europeans consider to be summer. We also have a "windows shut-air conditioner on" season, at the height of summer, which does not correspond to the classical definition of summer, but which residents of Phoenix recognize, I am sure. For them, the strange seasons of the desert rule, the two Sonoran rainy seasons, one in summer and one hinted at in winter, and other such strangeness.

This is all important to me because, as a kid growing up in California, I was taught the wrong seasons. I was taught the four seasons; spring, summer, fall, and winter, which bear no relation whatsoever to the actual seasonality of the Chapparal biome that predominates there. I remember cutting out orange and yellow leaves, in maple and oak shapes, to celebrate the coming of "Fall", when leaves fall from the trees. Of course, in most of CA, this is the opposite of the truth. In September, the cypresses and cedars are particularly green, the live oaks are leafing out some new growth, and the brown grass has turned emerald.