“Gardening, with all of its micro-seasons within seasons, has attuned me to seasonality — the way time is lived in windows, chunks of history within parentheses. Life itself is epochal even if the scale is simply my life, which is hardly epic. Seasonality means that, rather than being governed by the unceasing ticks of a minute hand, our lives unfold in eras. While minutes, days, and years carve up and measure the cosmic time of Earth’s course around a dwarf star, for temporal creatures like us, the season is perhaps the most natural form of timekeeping. The answer to the question, 'When am I' isn’t six o’clock or 2022; it is more like youth, middle age, chapter 3 of a life. The same is true collectively and communally, whether a marriage, an institution, or even a nation. To ask 'When are we?' isn’t a question of counting years as much as discerning a season.”