Online Reporter
Denford Sizeni
Now that summer has descended on the southern hemisphere, I cannot help but notice everything looks different. The air smells different. It smells better. Here at my home in Bulawayo, it’s the jacaranda bloom that is making the most notable change. While this new purple palette is ubiquitous, it is also subtle that its beauty might escape you if your attention is fixed on the daily rat race.
In fact, my mother, living in Botswana, told me a few weeks ago how, for years, she had never really noticed the jacaranda tree bloom near her house. Not that it never happened years prior, but she just never really took notice.
The day she spotted the beautiful purple carpet of fallen flowers, she just had to tell me all about it. To me, that quiet discovery of new and necessary change is the essence of a new season.
In our subtropical climate here in Zimbabwe, you will be fully pardoned for confusing spring with early summer. In practice, we effectively experience only two seasons — summer and winter — because the sun is almost always overhead in this part of the earth. After taking a closer look, however, I am certain you can fit in autumn and spring too. The transition from winter to summer may take several weeks. This gradual shift is perhaps what one might refer to as spring. It is not a sharp, extended and distinct period, as in temperate mid-latitude regions like Europe, which is why it is so easy to miss and underappreciate.
In the same way, our autumn is pretty much latent. It’s a “shy” season like spring, tucked in nicely between the end of the rainy season and our winter. But my goodness! Is anything more gorgeous than the savannah bushland falling into a soft amber as the ambient greenery slowly dies? I would think not, but that is just me.
The nice views that I am now seeing do not end on the ground. The sky looks different, more interesting and bolder.
The summer heating now taking place causes more cumulus clouds to form almost daily. These puffy, explosive, white cotton candy clouds are a nice decoration to the usually empty and hazy winter sky. The convective process that creates them produces some pretty wild and interesting shapes that are a delight to the cloud spotter — a hobby I await enthusiastically to introduce to my young nephew when he visits soon. The plethora of other cloud varieties that come alive in summer is equally amazing.
This change in the weather also means something else for me professionally. As an aeronautical weather observer, summer weather inevitably brings more work.
One of my tasks at the Joshua Mqabuko Nkomo International Airport is to monitor the weather and decode the sky to convey a concise report to air traffic control and the forecast office. At times, though, the sky gets so puzzling and chaotic. When this happens, it is usually followed by a spirited chat with my colleague on his views, a harder look at real-time satellite images and atmospheric temperature profiles. It is not always easy, but the work is fulfilling when
I bring order to a mess and make sense of an angry sky. That is when I know I have done my job right!
In the months to come, my work will be dense and demanding. It’s a professional focus that can become its own kind of “rat race,” just as consuming as any other. It’s frighteningly easy to miss it all — to go through the motions and get lost in the rush. Like my mother, it is easy to find oneself drifting through this fresh season. To register the trees, but not the sudden blossom; to see the sky, but not the meaning it conveys.
In the end, this is summer’s offer: a chance to pay attention. My job forces me to look up and make sense of the sky. But the bloom, the smell of the air, the way the rain brings life to the savannah, the tremendous rainbows, the exotic clouds — these things ask something simpler. They ask us to look, and to look now, because none of it will last. These small glories aren’t really hidden. They are all right there, in plain sight, just waiting for us to stop and see.
