seasonal

or monthless calendar caught on during early sparsening when a “back to nature” wave and the simplification push (let’s get rid of the arbitrariness of months: relax the “rhythm of fussy”) coincided with migrations to temperate zones with pronounced seasons. In a “world without a single timeline,” universal calendars and eras are of little use outside of cross-lore synchronization: there simply isn’t much need, innate or cultural, to align oneself to a mondial heartbeat. ■    The four seasons of the year start at solstices and equinoxes, with days numbered per season; for example “Spring 12” (“Spring” may be an ideogram in writing or esne in speech) is the 12th day of the northern-hemisphere spring, and “on 64th” is understood to refer to day 64 of the current season. Because of the varying number of days in a season (91 or 92), many would count beyond the boundary — e.g. “96th” to refer to day 96 of the previous season which may be day 4 or 5 of the current one; such overlapping count is common at the start of a new season, tapering off in a few weeks (“rarely beyond a hundred”). In most languages, names of the months live on as metaphors for weathers or nature states — almost detached from the calendar: one locality’s, or one year’s, March might be another’s May.

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