My Climate Change

Snakes here do not bask. And neither do I. Quite the opposite. We both seek the shade and go to work when the sun is low. I have become crepuscular! It means to be active around dawn and dusk, and it's a word I now intend to describe myself with at every opportunity.

When I arrived in Thailand I tried to do long walks like I had been brought up to do but I overheated and lost weight. Even with a hat my head was cooking. Eventually I learned there is a good reason why this country lacks footpaths.

Where I come from the seasons are defined by temperature and how we live follows the rhythm of annually swinging from cold to hot and back. Outdoor living in shorts with a soundtrack of insects humming shifts to cupping hot drinks around a blazing fire with a comforting book. There may be some unexpected days along the way but we know the cycle and temperature rules it all.

Here the seasons are more to do with the abundance or lack of water. As the joke goes, "Thailand has three seasons: hot, hotter and hottest".

Moving to this climate forces change in your behaviour. Such as not walking around like a mad-dog Englishman. Instead you put ice in your beer and take naps in the afternoon. Adapt or shrivel.

I never really put effort into a garden before I moved to the tropics but I still miss that winter break when the chores are fewer and generally less pressing. Here, there is always a need to either water/mulch or try to stay on top of the vigorous growth that comes with the humid warmth of tropical rains. Sometimes lushness puts up such a good fight.

There's no pause to take stock and refresh. And that can grind away at the gloss of living somewhere so wonderfully rich. If I could stand back with an outsider's view I would be amazed that on some days I actually don't want to get out into my garden.

And frost! I haven't seen frost for over twenty-five years. That makes me thrash around for an equivalent that I have gained in its place but I find none. I have grown to hate the cold but the thought of a long walk on a crisp blue-sky winter morning makes me yearn for that crunch underfoot. Memory can cherry-pick like this, so I force myself to think of the other, more common, mornings of damp and cold greyness that seeps through clothes and mildews your bones.

The harsh shadows of intense sun are my current replacement and I am trying to force my will to say I like them but I am not convinced. My enthusiasm for the garden tasks ahead is not renewed yet, although I suspect that is my aim here.

I assume a snake doesn't tie itself in knots. As a warm-blooded being I can control my own temperature but apparently not the track of my thoughts. I can keep my body at optimum warmth whilst falling into the cold blue of melancholy or stomping into red-hot irritation.

This rambling wander around the topic of "temperature" feels like it is not leading me anywhere constructive. I could still end up either blue or red.

Then perhaps a touch of clarity. The middle of every day here is the unpleasant equivalent of those dark, wet English mornings, and every day it is followed by the relieved bliss of late afternoon in the tropics. It's not frost but I do also love the crunch underfoot of heat-dried leaves. Either way it's scrunch, scrunch, scrunch.

So the sun has mellowed and the garden calls. These minor complaints that came with the heat of midday have ceased their bubbling. I slip into the routine like a comfortable old shirt knowing the gentle exercise will do wonders for parboiled brains. Plus there's always the chance of meeting some of the other crepuscular creatures as we all climb out of our shady holes and slither around this patch of land that warms my soul.

Written in response to the weekly CreativeGarden Challenge on this week's theme of "temperature".