When the Calendar Forgets: Weather Without Memory

My grandmother used to know exactly when the monsoon would arrive by watching the behavior of ants and the color of evening clouds. Now I check weather apps that are wrong half the time, while the rains come earlier or later or not at all, following patterns that seem to shift every year.

We’re nostalgic for seasons that worked like clockwork, for weather that was predictable enough to build rituals around, for a relationship with natural cycles that felt like relationship rather than random encounter.

Happy’s mother tells stories of winters so cold you could see your breath indoors, summers so reliable you could plan harvests months in advance. The seasons of her childhood had personality—distinct arrivals and departures, characteristic moods, familiar rhythms that shaped everything from what people wore to when they celebrated to how they organized their emotional lives.

Now seasons blur together. Winter isn’t cold enough for the crops that depend on dormancy. Summer heat arrives in February and lingers into November. The monsoon comes late and leaves early, or comes early and never leaves, or comes in sudden violent bursts instead of the steady nourishment that rice fields need.

We’re experiencing weather that has no precedent in human memory, climate patterns that don’t correspond to the seasonal wisdom passed down through generations. The folklore that helped our ancestors prepare for winter is useless when winter never comes. The traditional knowledge about when to plant and when to harvest fails when seasons themselves have become unpredictable.

This isn’t just meteorological disruption—it’s cultural amnesia. Seasons were the original calendar, the natural organizing principle around which human societies built their rhythms. Religious festivals corresponded to agricultural cycles. Traditional foods reflected what was available when. Stories and songs emerged from the particular moods that each season brought.

When seasons become unreliable, we lose more than weather patterns. We lose cultural continuity, the sense that we’re living in the same world our ancestors knew, that their wisdom about timing and preparation and seasonal adaptation can guide us.

The nostalgia we feel for “normal” seasons is really nostalgia for predictability, for a world stable enough that children could learn from their grandparents’ experience, where knowledge passed down through generations remained relevant.

Now every season is unprecedented. Every year breaks temperature records. Every storm is described as unusual, extreme, historic. We’re living through the end of stable seasons and the beginning of chaos disguised as weather.

Our children will never experience seasons the way we did, just as we’ve never experienced them the way our grandparents did. Each generation now inherits a different climate, a different set of patterns to try to understand and adapt to.

The seasons we’re nostalgic for aren’t just missing—they’re extinct. We’re grieving the loss of cyclical time, of natural rhythms we could count on, of weather that felt like home rather than disruption.

We’re the last generation to remember when seasons felt seasonal, when winter meant winter and summer meant summer, when the earth itself provided the calendar by which human life organized itself.

What we’ve lost isn’t just predictable weather. What we’ve lost is the possibility of seasonal wisdom, of generational knowledge that remains relevant across decades, of cultural practices rooted in environmental stability.

We’re nostalgic for seasons that will never return, for a relationship with natural cycles that climate change has permanently altered. The weather of our childhood is now the weather of story, as unreachable as any fairy tale.