The wind is blowing: it is the wind that changes the seasons, hot to cold. It blows and blows until the season knows it is time to sit on its suitcase, overstuffed with things that happened, zip it up and travel to the other side of the world.
Sometimes, the season gets trapped for a week, like a little whirlwind of leaves, or one leaf on a small plant going round and round: an incantation. You get one last period of very cold or very hot. You are trapped, too, like a sheep in its wool: you are in the present, there is no going forward until the season is on its way.
In Things I Don’t Want to Know, Deborah Levy is carrying her luggage up a steep path on a mountain in Spain. “The smell of wood fired in the stone houses below and the bells on sheep grazing in the mountains and the strange silence that happens in between the bells chiming suddenly made me want to smoke.”
It is spring. The sound between Levy’s bells, the poet James Wright might say, is the sheep grazing – “Sheep eat everything / All the way down to the roots,” he writes. This is because they are allowed to graze only for a little while, “and they have a good life of it / While it lasts”.
The sheep is the mascot of seasons changing. Winter is Baa Baa Black Sheep. Spring is Mary had a Little Lamb. Summer is Little Boy Blue. Autumn is Little Bo Peep.
The sheep’s wool does not wave in the wind. Its skin does not get wet in the rain. When the season changes, we shear the sheep, cleaving the seasons apart, weaving one year’s winter into another year’s protection, like the things we have learned, the things we can use to be tough, the jumper we remember to pack in case the temperature drops at night: it is almost winter now, it is not quite summer yet.
Sheep are descended from a “mouflon”. Yes (yes!). Today’s sheep cannot survive in the wild: we must shear them or they will die (we must shear them before we kill them). Not the sheep of the old seasons. Not the mouflon. The mouflon’s woolly undercoat grows according to the amount of daylight.
The seasons are opposite depending on whether you are at the top or bottom of the world, the cold end or the hot end. In The Transit of Venus, her characters in Sydney, Australia for now, Shirley Hazzard writes about what it is like to grow up in the southern hemisphere, which is like growing up in the silence between the bells.
What was natural was hedgerows, hawthorn, skylarks, the chaffinch on the orchard bough. You had never seen these but believed in them with perfect faith [...] Literature had not simply made these things true. It had placed Australia in perpetual, flagrant violation of reality.
In Meander, Spiral, Explode, a book about alternative narrative forms – not the masculine rise, climax, fall and resolution – Jane Alison writes about the structure that defined her childhood, when her parents swapped partners with another couple. The new families were symmetrical: “A diplomat father, a mother, and two little girls the same ages on either side, a boy born to each pair soon after.” One family lived in the northern hemisphere, another in the southern: “Our summer, their winter; our day, their night.”
“When I learned of the Coriolis force, the symmetry got more elaborate,” she writes. “Waters and winds spin one way in the northern hemisphere, the opposite way in the southern … I saw myself spinning one way in life, my counterpoint sister spinning another.”
The wind blows. The seasons are changing. You are tired. Your mind is Clouds, by Christina Rossetti:
White sheep, white sheep,
On a blue hill,
When the wind stops,
You all stand still
When the wind blows,
You walk away slow.
White sheep, white sheep,
Where do you go?
• Helen Sullivan is a Guardian journalist. Her first book, a memoir called Freak of Nature, will be published in 2024
Have an animal, insect or other subject you feel is worthy of appearing in this very serious column? Let me know: helen.sullivan@theguardian.com
