I live in Michigan now, for now, and to make the most of our experience, we’re living as the locals do: by the season. Clarissa Pinkola Estes cites her version of micro seasons in Women Who Run With the Wolves:

We’ve observed the great melt that sent icebergs to the riverbanks as they rose over their beds. This is the time that spiles are plugged into the sides of maples, metal buckets hanging to collect the clear, sweet liquid that will soon be taken to the sugarhouse to boil. The wind bites, moves through any uninsulated crack in the house, yet there’s a change in the air too.

There is the micro season where it is still fall, as evidenced by the heaps of discolored leaves in street gutters. It can be warm and dry as a summer’s day and also invite flurries of snow that make us feel as though we’re in a sepia snow globe. It is very interesting to experience seasons in a place I once spent all my seasons but paid no attention to, left for eight formative years, and am now returning on my Mary Oliver/Clarissa Pinkola Estes tenure of my life to study the family of things in nature.

My mind is presently residing in the here and now of things, the what's right in front of my face and what I can do about it, rather than focusing too much on what the future holds or ruminating on the past. This means fully experiencing what the mundane little pockets of midwestern life on this corner plot of land have to offer me. Mostly it's been seasonal delights, the slightest changes. I make note of their beauty, appreciating them, translating them into a tender poetry I can store up for myself when I need a little treat.