Seasons are where the weather lives

Anne-Michelle is back! Until I learn how to change the byline on these posts I will have to step in to remind you when Anne-Michelle Tessier, Linguist-in-Chief, is writing the posts instead of me. I will also take this opportunity to tell you about the time I was driving across the border to see AMT in America, which is what I said to the border guard: “Why are you crossing the border today?” “To see Anne-Michelle.” Which led to the frustrating and baffling question, “Who is Anne-Michelle?” In case you too do not know, you can find out more here. The border guard got a somewhat shorter version.

Over to you, AMT:

In one of my previous lives, I taught Cognitive Development to second year psych majors—myself having knowledge of the topic consistent with a third-year psych major—and one of the topics I was especially keen to learn and then teach about was how children experience the passage of time. I found the relevant literature to contain several great questions and few satisfying answers (which may well be a hard truth about developmental science in general). In particular, I remember reading numerous studies from the 1970s and 80s that involved, e.g., asking five year olds what the weather is usually like on their birthday, which is just baffling on multiple fronts. The passage of time is somehow anchored to our memories, sure, and memories are often anchored in time via seasons (and seasons are where the weather lives…) But seasons also seem especially hard to grasp for a young child. They cover a lot of days, but a few months, and if you’ve only known a couple dozens of those?

This series of ruminations has been prompted by the end of summer, the coming of fall, and my new research project of speculating semi-wildly about the cognitive states of my dogs. What is their experience of time, day to day? How long does it feel to them when we go to work for the day? when I go to the bathroom? when I visit to my parents for a week? An old friend once received somersaults of joy from his tiny dog when he came back from taking out the trash, and we debated whether that meant she had experienced his absence as lengthy, or whether even two minutes of absence was worth a party. (A third potential source of the joy, it only now occurs to me, is that my friend had brought back the light scent of trash.)  

In my current household, our morning outing routine is that I first leash up Howard and load him into the car (his favourite fortress), then I come back to get Bagel. The other day, I took Howard to the vet alone—he was a bit sedated and I didn’t want Bagel badgering him—and when we got back a while later, Bagel stood at the door very sure it was now her turn. Then she saw Howard was also back and looked highly confused. … Did the 90 minutes we were gone feel similar to her to the 90 seconds a car load-up usually takes? Of course you might suggest she just felt she was owed a walk, which is fair, but she did seem bemused.

So now we are in back-to-school nostalgia season, and I’m out here a la recherche du floof-temps perdu. While the sun is shining right now, the rain and the dark of the Pacific Northwest are coming—and do they know it too? In what ways do they know it? Do they wake up every day expecting the weather from yesterday? Or does Howard worry each time that it might be pouring? (his least favourite) and does Bagel hope continuously for sudden snow? (her most favourite). I am inclined to think their genes are still sufficiently aligned with the wild that their instincts tell them about weather cycles…at least Howard’s genes. Bagel’s wildness may be mostly replaced, at a molecular level, with unicorn candyfloss.

Some evenings, Howard will be snoozing on the carpet, then get up abruptly and with purpose search around the house until he finds a particular toy. Once it has been retrieved he returns to a contented sleep, with the toy securely under his butt probably, and it sure looks like he’s just thought “oh wait, whatever happened to that stuffed octopus??” and then resolved to answer the question. Perhaps that kind of memory is just a flash of an image, a smell, a texture—ooh! That stripey squeaky thing! Perhaps it’s a good thing we hardly throw out even the most rag-like of former stuffies.

I will keep watching them, and report back soon.