Seasons Changing

on what happens when you move across the ocean and suddenly your clothes are too warm

The seasons are changing and autumn comes slowly with days of calm heat and windy cold nights, and today I crushed a dry leaf when I talked about something with a friend. It’s hard to skip winter and come back to soon to be winter again. Back home in Poland spring is coming behind corners and creeps as people are not yet sure whether to celebrate with barbecues. And here, far from Poland, I have been looking for a jacket and gloves. 

Checking only one bag in?

Skipping seasons is not only the weather and the bare legs and sweaty armpits. And not only morning breath dancing in white strokes and cold knuckles on the handles of my bike. 

Seasons are for growing up and shifting a word I made up this summer - European Summer - when I felt like I was not longer growing up but being stretched out in the body that’s already adult. 

During the summer of 2023, Storm Polly hit Amsterdam and a tree fell down at the little strip of green where Bilderdijkstraat goes over Hugo de Grootgracht canal. I forgot to close my window and spent my whole shift thinking I would come home to shattered glass on my green duvet covers. Two people died in the storm, one in Germany and one in the Netherlands, but I heard more people lamenting over the fallen tree.

My dog doesn’t know how to walk around the park anymore - over me pouring coffee

That summer I had to wear a coat more than shorts and I kept getting wet on my bike. I went to sleep late and woke up in the small hours with my eyes puffy and I made croissants and served sleepy people and some would only say their orders, but some would tell me their whole life story and a little more. 

I went for my first trip alone - to Copenhagen - and convinced myself to take, apart from my sneakers, a pair of my mum’s old knee-length boots. I spent 3 days there - arriving on a Wednesday morning on the 12th of July and leaving late in the Friday evening on the 14th. It was colder than I thought in Copenhagen and I kept wearing the same clothes combination over and over, but no one knew, because I knew no one in the city. 

When I arrived in the apartment straight from the airport I laid on the sofa and watched the sky get darker. Somehow I managed to get a full apartment to myself - a friend of a friend of a friend had left the keys and I found myself in a nicely furnished place, minimalistic yet with signs of people living there.
I thought it wouldn’t rain, yet it started pouring. It wasn’t the Polish summer rain that makes the air light, yet dense with humidity. It was a dark type of rain that gave me that weird feeling of being alone in the new place with no plan and a sudden urge to stay in and pretend you’re back home where you know where you keep your favorite mug.

During the next three days, I walked for hours and hid in cafes and stores because I forgot to take an umbrella, and it kept raining. I thought about buying an umbrella but then I spent the money on clothes in second-hand stores. And then I bought too much and spent the last minutes before leaving the apartment trying to fit everything into my backpack. Stuffing the clothes with the sole of the high knee boot, which started to fall apart after the kilometers on cobblestones. 

That season felt like first rejection, finding myself through other people and not taking the time to understand I didn’t yet understand a lot. I didn’t care about a routine because it was summer, and because I was 20, and because it was my last summer in Amsterdam. It felt like a summer that had to be done that way. With indulgence, mistakes, and wine drank outside. It felt like I was watching myself from just a meter away, but not from inside me. But that wasn’t bad, so I thought then and still think now. I was still shifting, and it had to happen that way. 

Then came autumn, and then winter and although in Amsterdam they feel like a stretch of rainy weather with wind trying to push you off the bike and inside your house, they were to each their own. 

The change from summer to autumn seems to be the one people mourn the most. In Amsterdam, summer never fully came, and when it did it just sneaked late behind the corner, so sunny days laid over September. 

The first day of my internship was a Friday and after six I went to two Albert Heijn’s trying to find trays for a barbeque, then I went home to change, making a mess in my room and then I left the house realizing I had not worn enough layers but I was already late to see my friends at the park. Summer always feels rushed and is full of unfinished tasks and hoodies left laying on the kitchen counter, and sometimes moldy tea cups.

September felt like a never-ending month. One where I started a new job and sat at a desk a lot, and one where I spilled beer over a first kiss, we carried the broken glass to the bar with shame and the giddiness of a first date. The 80th Venice Film Festival happened and Poor Things won Best Film and Green Border by Agnieszka Holland won the Special Jury Price.

Everyone knew that one weekend would be the last sunny one, so we all sat in parks and on chairs in front of bars even when the sun went down under the canal’s water and then lights started to tinkle. I remember a certain night, when I decided to stay up late and wake up tired to my internship and we sat with two of my friends, both their names starting with M outside a bar on Prinsenstraat, I was wearing a jean-like dress, a white T-shirt and a red bag that now has been thrown away, because the paint on the material had started to peel off, and mom decided it had to go. It was a hard goodbye. I drove back home on a bike and it felt like the last time in a while it was acceptable to bike with just a T-shirt on.

The coming of winter is not welcomed but expected. With people preparing themselves for short days, which here in Australia seems to be a concept too hard to comprehend. Only now do I realize how much - back in Europe - we ready ourselves for sunsets at 4. 

That season felt like there was never enough time. I felt more like myself, but I understood that I had only this one last stretch of time in the city, so I made excuses for myself and allowed myself to be sloppy at times. I worked 6 days a week and slept in 2 beds stretched across Amsterdam and cried a lot about soon flying across the globe. I made pillows and oversized T-shirts wet in small circles. 

I was to leave Amsterdam and Europe and everything I knew behind to go study on the other side of the globe, in Australia. So before the season came to its peak I left. I was in winter but escaped halfway and suddenly positioned myself in summer. 

And that’s inconsequential. 

I left Amsterdam on the first of February and I remember that sun was shining that day, so it was harder to cry. I came to Warsaw and got an ear infection, packed a green big bag that weighed 27 kilos, and left on the 11th of February. I had a layover in Doha, and on the second plane that didn’t take off for two hours because of a small storm, I watched Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, the 1971 version. 

My sloppiness in winter however was not a singular, not a personal thing. People become comfortable in winter, because of cold and blankets that wait inside. They sleep in on Sundays because the outside is not inviting, and they promise themselves that with spring coming they will clean out their closet and set harsher routines. 

But I came to summer half winter. The 13th of February, my first full day in Melbourne was one of the hottest this summer with temperatures reaching 39 degrees, but I had a plan to walk so I walked and I walked long. Almost 10km. I read Patti’s Smith “Just Kids” and she was talking about how when she visited Paris the weather was bad and it rained all the time, so I thought to myself I couldn’t complain. 

In summer, to which I arrived, people become freer with themselves. They sleep in on Saturdays because the days stretch out well into the night with the warmth of the concrete floating up the air. They set looser deadlines because summer comes once a year and it’s always better to be outside and things can always be done later. 

My personal change of seasons was inconsequential. 

I went from one excuse to another and that is said in not a patronizing voice. I had to cherish summer and swim in the ocean. But the seasons are more than just a way for us to make sense of the year, or so I have realized. 

The Australian summer of 2023, just like Amsterdam’s summer of 2023 came late. I was new to the city so partially it was spent alone, but well spent. It felt more like a summer where I saw the world definitely from me because I no longer had people whose perspective I could use to form my understanding of the world, I was just slowly finding them.

I got used to new words and started saying keen much more. In March I moved houses and counted that the one I live in now is the fourth one since moving out of home at 18. In April I went to Indonesia and rode a motorcycle, by myself for the first time. Again, I felt like I was shifting. I started working at a cafe and counted it as my 6th job since moving out of home at 18. I went to lectures at a campus that undoubtedly started looking more autumn-like, with the leaves turning yellow, and listened to people telling me it’s good to believe in writing, and it made me feel good about myself. This would be the nice kind of shifting, the gentle kind. 

Leaves did turn yellow, and yesterday I wore 4 layers and a coat and it was still cold, I am sure it is autumn now, or maybe winter already - I can’t count seasons in a non-European way. When I called my mom this evening, her morning, it was 23 degrees back home and she’s been painting the fireplace. Painting feels like a quintessential spring job, so she is doing her seasons right. I bought a desk today, the first one since moving out of home, and drank tea at it, which feels like a quintessential autumn job, so I guess I am starting to do my seasons right as well. 

There’s a book we had to read for school - Chłopi - which translates to The Peasants, and it is not just any book, Władysław Reymont won a Noble Prize in Literature for it. The book is 728 pages long and divided into four parts: 1 - Autumn, 2 - Winter, 3 - Spring, and 4 - Summer. Chłopi is set in XIXth century, rural Poland and apart from being a great epic representing the reality of Poland at that time it perfectly portrays humans' dependency on seasons and their effect on one's life. 

Wojciech Zembaty writes on it in his article for Culture.pl:

In the broader scope, the novel shows four seasons of village’s life, with its calendar rituals, cycles of ploughing, plantation and harvesting. The prominent role of nature and its poetic descriptions are one of the most distinguishing elements of the novel. This book has an almost shamanic feel. Reymont animates nature and connects its changing seasons with human moods and emotions. Such connection is one of the main distinctions between peasant and modern city folk. Humans and seasons meld together.

There is a rhythm that comes with seasons and the inconsequence of my (seasonal) rhythm is something that has left me bothered, like I have cheated on the seasons and they have been leaving me little signs they know, but won’t address it directly.

And although I feel the cold and my throat is sore, because maybe I wore one layer too little I still feel like we’re going into summer soon. After all, May should be for spring and June is pretty much summer already because school has just stopped. But here, this break is called the winter one and people are wearing puffer jackets although there will be no snow. And I will allow myself to find myself in the seasons changing.

And I’ll shift, but I’ll also shrink sometimes and put more layers and allow myself to feel the seasons, even if I am to skip them soon enough again.