The seasons can refer to the weather and the physical changes of our natural world, but we often use the word metaphorically to describe and explore various stages, moments and turning points of our lives.
Katherine May, author of Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times says:
Below are a number of research and creative writing prompts to help you reflect on the seasons, both literal and metaphorical, of your life and/or those of your ancestors.
1. Describing the Seasons
Head outside.
Brainstorm words and phrases to describe what you see, hear, touch, taste and smell?
Use these words and phrases in a piece of writing that conveys a sense of the current season without telling the reader what that season is.
2. A Change in Seasons
Select a time you or an ancestor travelled or moved from one place to another.
What season was it in the place you/they were leaving?
What season was it when you/they arrived in the new town, city or country?
Describe leaving and arriving, revealing the seasons without naming them.
How might their emotional state be reflected in or challenged by the seasons as you have described?
3. Turning Points
Turning points in our lives (or those of our ancestors) are those events, sometimes obviously significant and sometimes simply a moment, when something (or everything) changes. This can signify the end of one season in life and the beginning of another.
Brainstorm a list of turning points in the life of your subject (which may be yourself).
Choose one turning point and write about it.
4. Research the Weather
Historical newspapers can offer hints about the weather and the seasons of the past.
Sometimes, it’s recorded explicitly in the articles themselves, such as the description of a wedding the person you are researching. But it may be that the information is articles that do not mention them at all, but instead recording the damage from a storm or a farmer’s yield or particular dances and other social events that occurred. You may even find daily temperatures and rain levels recorded.
For example, while researching my book Many Hearts One Voice, I came across an article about the wedding of Marjorie Learmonth to her second husband Leslie Le Souef on page 14 of the West Australian for Monday 27 October 1947. That was a wonderful find in itself; however on the previous page was an article about how wet the weekend (and the entire month) had been.
Spend time exploring the newspapers local to where your ancestors lived (in Australia we are very fortunate to have this freely available through the wonderful digital database Trove thanks to the National Library of Australia).
What hints can you find as to how life looked like across the seasons where your ancestor lived?
5. Naming and Listening to the Seasons
Was the year clearly divided into four seasons (summer, autumn, winter, spring) where you (or your ancestors) lived at particular time, or was there some other way of naming them?
For example, where I grew up in the Northern Territory, we simply had the Wet and the Dry, with what was known as the Build-Up in between. Many First Nations groups in Australia have six seasons. The Noongar people of the south-west have Birak, Bunuru, Djeran, Makuru, Djilba and Kambarang, each of which is determined by what is happening in the natural environment.
How were the seasons named where you or your ancestors lived at a particular time? How did the seasons influence/impact what was grown and eaten at a particular time of year? Did migrants arriving in Australia (whether from England or elsewhere) adapt to the conditions of their new home, or did they attempt to recreate the seasons from the place they had left. How might understanding First Nations knowledge have changed/helped them?
6. Images and Photographs
What images do you have (or can find) about a particular time period? What hints do they contain as to the time or season? What are they wearing? What is in the background (e.g. plants, flowers, clear sky overcast)?
If you do not have photographs specifically about your subject, are there other archival photos available (e.g. online or in newspapers) that could help you imagine and describe a particular place or time?
7. Seasons of Life
As mentioned at the beginning of this post, Katherine May writes, “Life meanders like a path through the woods. We have seasons when we flourish and seasons when the leaves fall from us, revealing our bare bones. Given time, they grow again.”
Write about a particularly happy and/or challenging season of life.
Over to You
Where will your exploration of the seasons take you? How might doing so enrich your understanding of your ancestors, or of your own life?
