When I taught in Japan, questions about the weather were par for the course. It's a natural bridge into more complex topics and the Japanese love talking about it anyway, because the seasons (and their weather patterns) inform their culture at a deep level.

Every March or April, as we headed into yet another Japanese spring, the weather chat would take a slight segue, because the temperatures tended to move around quite a lot. The idiom, 'three days cool, four days warm' would crop up unbidden time and again, it being one of those things that every Japanese would have heard as a kid. And yes, there was often a few days of cool weather followed by a slightly longer period of warm weather, so anecdotally, there was some truth to the saying. But I'm not a weatherman.

Songs titles and lyrics invariably reference the months and seasons as emblems of something else. Of course, most of these songs follow Northern Hemisphere seasons, so 'November Rain' has a different connotation down on the bottom of the world, these being the beginning of winter and summer respectively. But it doesn't always follow that the wet and cold is a time of misery, nor that the summer is unbridled joy.

I have written quite a few poems about autumn (spring in the north) and, try as I might, find it hard to escape from the 'season of decrease' narrative. It seems to work well with the way I think. I don't do joy very well.