Brown County
Seasons
~by Mark Blackwell
I
reckon that just about everybody has a calendar. And I reckon everybody knows what a calendar is for. It’s for tracking days, weeks, months, and seasons. On a calendar the seasons are delineated by the position of the sun. You have solstices and equinoxes. The solstices are the longest (summer) and the shortest (winter) days of the year. And the equinoxes are the two times a year when days are of an equal length. It is from the solstices and equinoxes that our four seasons: spring, summer, autumn and winter, originate. Various weather conditions are connected with the seasons; spring the season that requites our ardent optimism with mud; summer with its heat, humidity and mosquitos. And then you’ve got autumn in Brown County. I can’t think of any drawbacks to it. Those words alone, “autumn in Brown County” constitute a poem. Winter down here can be a time of discontent and in some cases down right regret, usually because you didn’t go ahead and get that extra rick or two of stove wood. In Brown County, Indiana we’ve got all the regular seasons and more .
52 Our Brown County • Sept./Oct. 2020
If you go a few hundred miles south, the four seasons shrink down to just two or three and in the case of Hawaii, they just have one; it’s called Perfect. But here in Brown County, depending on who you’re talkin’ to at the time, there are a dozen or more seasons. We have to have the big four and then we have what you might consider sub-seasons, like when spring shows up. The first signs of spring in Brown County are sounds. There’s the gurgle of the snowmelt running in the ravines and then there is the slurping sound of sucking mud. Of the two signs of spring the most reliable is mud. In the spring mud is everywhere. It’s muddy in places where you would swear there couldn’t be mud—like your livin’ room rug. I remember not even going outside but turning around to confront a pile of the stuff sittin’ half way between my easy chair and the woodstove. It puzzled the dickens out of me but I finally came to the realization that the mud was following me in from the wood pile. Other Brown County spring sub-seasons are Morel mushroom season and snake season—they often coincide. Then there is turkey hunting season but it is not as widely celebrated as it once was. Another sign of spring is Motorcycle season. It typically occurs on the first day that the temperature reaches 15 degrees above freezing and the first motorcycle occasionally beats out the first robin. And then summer arrives with Festival season and the voice of the banjo is heard throughout the county. It seems like half the south and much of the population of the Midwest makes a pilgrimage to the Bill Monroe Music Park. It’s like the county gets a new village. The rest of summer is just “outdoors” season. You know, hiking, camping, canoeing, kayaking, fishing, loafing, and stuff like that. Next comes Squirrel season accompanied by the sharp bark of .22 caliber rifles and the
