Finding Seasons in an Endless Summer
My first full year living in Indonesia
This post is inspired by s last piece My Small Summer Stories. While reading her short stories about the feelings summer brings I began to reminisce about my summers spent in Australia, the anticipation and the obvious signs summer is on its way. I then started to think about how I view “summer” now that I live closer to the equator where life often feels like an endless summer. When I read posts like this I can’t help but feel a twinge of jealousy for the anticipation that others feel for the warmth. Summer, as
has said before, becomes lodged in our hearts with a beautiful almost ethereal nostalgia. So what is summer now to me in a place where the average temperature is 28 degrees Celsius? In this new home of mine, I’m having to relearn the seasons all over again.
It’s been a year now since we made the move from the South West of Western Australia to the island of Lombok in Indonesia. It is a place I visited first at three, then again at thirteen and as I moved into my late teens and 20’s it became somewhat of a second home to me. I would travel over for a week to a month or more when I needed a getaway. Mostly on my own, I came to surf and to sit in berugas with my local friends, gossiping and talking about life. I spent my thirtieth birthday there and then around when I was thirty two I met my husband there and became pregnant with our first child.
Although my history with Lombok is long and rich, one thing I had never done before now was live here for a whole year. This last year has been the first time I have experienced the full turning of the wheel and become more acquainted with the subtle shifts in the weather and the climate.
On the surface, the seasons in Indonesia are divided roughly into two, Wet and Dry. The Wet season supposedly goes from November to March and the Dry takes up the rest. The Wet season is known for its long heavy downpours and humid stifling heat, and the Dry brings with it cooler winds and crisp 20-degree mornings. But what these blanket seasons do not take into account is the subtleties and movement within Wet and Dry.
We started our year here in the last days of August 2023, the sun shone hot and fierce but the breeze from the sea helped to cool the land down. It wasn’t long however until the winds started to drop off, which was wonderful for our surfing hearts but became harder for our core temperatures. There was a season I found, wedged into between the Dry and Wet where the winds dropped but the rain didn’t come. The mosquitoes began to swarm and the roads remained dusty and dry, the hills becoming barer and barer as there remained only the tiniest patch of green on the trees that had managed to tap down deep enough to find some groundwater. The air becomes increasingly more and more humid as the months roll on and the clouds gather as we look up to them, prayers on our lips, begging for just one droplet of water to come from above and break the spell. Last year it took until Christmas for the rains to set in. At the first sprinkle, we ran outside, dancing and whooping with glee. The spell had been broken and slowly but steadily the world returned to the lush vibrant green that was ‘my’ Lombok.
Each big downpour leaves 30-45 minutes of cool after it. A chance to put on a T-shirt and not sweat, to feel cosy for a brief minute. But once the rains start the humidity can become overwhelming. I had visions of us living whole days outside, kids playing happily in the garden. But in the heat of the day, the only thing to do is retreat into the cool relief of the AC, which at times does not feel cold enough. The upside to the wet season however is the smooth glassy waves, abundance of surf and magnificent storms. When big ones rolled in we would gather together on the veranda couch, the fat heavy raindrops inches away from our faces and watch as the lightning pierced the sky, then huddle in nervous excitement as the deep booms of thunder shook the earth we sat atop.
Once the rains settle in everything becomes green. The once dry and barren-looking fields turn a swaying verdant as rice paddies cover the earth, corn crops, although quite problematic, cover the charred hills and the yellow in the palm fronds disappear, leaving only jewelled tones of emerald floating in the sky on their long skinny trunks. Everything feels alive in the wet season and life slows down. At any moment you could be caught in a bucketing rainstorm and have to retreat to find shelter. As most people’s main source of transport is motorbikes and scooters, the rain is a perfectly good excuse not to be somewhere on time. Expectations are lessened as everyone is at the mercy of the heavens.
As the clouds become devoid of rain, turning instead to a bright billowy white there is a calm to the air, a moment in time before the winds begin to blow once more and the green brought by the Wet still lingers. It is this time I have found is my favourite, as the humidity lessens but the magic remains. A time of respite before the world turns to dust and dry once more.
I have noticed each month comes with its own budding of flowers or falling of leaves, but the tropics do not adhere to the simple rules of Autumn or Spring. As I become more familiar with the flora of South Lombok so will their rhythms, I hope, become etched into my memory and I will be able to tell the passing of time through the bare or blossoming branches of the trees, the colours hidden in walls of green or popping with joy from the silver grey of the bare hills.
This last year has been a lesson that nature is so much more subtle than we are taught in school. That four or two seasons don’t really exist, there is so much more nuance in the patterns of each month, and it is only by living a life in observation of the natural world, that we get a chance to really experience the fullness of it’s seasons.
What do the seasons look like where you come from? And how do you determine the passing of them?
Loved this journey through the seasons and so special that you’ve had the opportunity to experience them all 🥰
I struggle without a winter. Although they can be long and harsh, I feel most alive in the autumn and my body appreciates the freshness and rest that winter brings. Spring and summer is always exciting though, ocean swims and flower gardening are essentials haha 🌷
I totally appreciate your descriptions of the subtelties of seasons in the tropics. 3 years ago our family moved from London, UK to Nairobi, Kenya. So, in a way, the seasons are flipped to the opposite of what they were in the Northern hemisphere, but as the equator runs through Kenya, it's more about a wet and dry season... except that Nairobi is at altitude, so when there is no sun, it is also cold. Oddly, the other day I found myself feeling jealous of the instagram post of a balmy evening in Southern Europe...even though I'd been sitting in the sunshine & swimming in our pool that day. It's hot, but it's not "summer" somehow. The cycle is different.