When I was in school I heard about four seasons, winter, spring, summer and fall, and I was told that it was different for us in the Caribbean where we only had two, wet and dry. When I asked when they were, I was told to “look and see”.

The wet and the dry are easy to see. Long months of drought, with cracked hard earth, brown grass and dry scrub are obvious. So is the rain, when clouds sit upon us, obscuring the mountain and building streams that run to the sea. But, I have come now to realize that we don’t have the expectations of seasons; we have just days that will be.

We have days of angst that prelude a storm, building tension in rising ocean swells that break over the banks of the beach, and then hurricanes, each their own named occasion and fury. There are listless days of ennui that become shrouded in the lemon haze of Sahara dust when the horizon is obscured. There are days of yellow skies when the wind won’t blow; then the raucous, frenetic, days of high energy when the wind is a madness all its own.

Today was a windy day, defined by the sound of roiling leaves and swaying branches with a wind like crashing surf, coming in waves down the mountainside, surrounding my house, breaking through the bamboo to rattle shutters and slam doors.

Tonight was a quiet night, when the wind died down and the stillness grew loud and we could hear the sound of the animals and insects. The bell frogs sing a pretty chime, the crickets call out in loud atonal ringing, and in the moonlight birdsong echoes. With no clouds to cover the mountain the evening becomes cool and the stars hang heavily in the chill air.

Dawn comes up, reaching into the sky and the stars remain for a brief moment while the dew falls and night and day are one. The color of the morning sky fades into brightening blue and a new season begins as another day.

I have come to learn that our two seasons are not the wet and the dry, just the difference between one moment and the next.