Reading the seasons in two places

Every place has its own calendar, and it is not the one printed on the wall. It is the calendar of weather: when the rain comes, when the air changes, when the fruit arrives in the market. Moving between countries means learning a new one.

Northern Vietnam: four seasons

People from Hanoi like to say the city has four real seasons, and you can feel each one:

• Spring brings fine drizzle (mưa phùn) and the damp weeks of nồm, when walls and floors sweat with humidity.
• Summer is hot and stormy.
• Autumn is the favourite: cool, dry air and the scent of milk flowers (hoa sữa) in the streets.
• Winter is short but cold enough for coats, damp and grey.

Southern Taiwan: heat, rain, wind

Tainan is in the south of Taiwan, near the Tropic of Cancer, and its year is shaped differently. Winters are mild, dry and sunny, the most comfortable time of year. In late spring comes the plum rain season (梅雨), a period of steady rain fronts around May and June. Summer is long and hot, with afternoon thunderstorms, and from summer into autumn is typhoon season, when everyone follows the forecasts and offices sometimes close for a "typhoon day".

Learning a new calendar

I find that much of feeling at home somewhere is knowing what comes next. In the first year, every weather change is a surprise. By the second, you start to anticipate: the sticky weeks of May, the clear blue of December, the moment in autumn when the heat finally breaks.

There is also a quieter pleasure in comparing. When the first cool day arrives in Tainan, I think of autumn in Hanoi. Two calendars running side by side, one lived and one remembered.

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Photos: mpmpix, hugo_ob, kanenori on Pixabay, used under the Pixabay Content License. These are not my photographs.