Remember when we used to have four seasons? Those quaint three-month chunks that gave rhythm to our year, each with its distinct personality and purpose?

Welcome to the new normal: Summer and Not-Summer. That’s it. That’s the year.

Summer now stretches its sweaty fingers deep into spring and fall, transforming what was once a gentle progression into a binary switch.

One day you’re hunting for your sandals, the next you’re desperately fishing out your winter coat from the back of the closet. Spring and fall – the transitional seasons – have become memories.

Remember spring? That poetic season of renewal and cherry blossoms? Now it’s more like a brief intermission between the last snow and the first 90-degree day. The daffodils barely have time to stretch their yellow heads before they’re wilting in an unseasonable heat wave.

Fall hasn’t fared much better. What used to be a glorious parade of autumn colors has become a rushed performance. The leaves barely change in Cali anyway; now they’re blown off the trees by either an early winter blast or a late summer scorcher.

Not-Summer – that amalgamation of what used to be winter, with bits of spring and fall mixed in – is like a moody teenager. One day it’s throwing a polar vortex tantrum, the next it’s surprisingly mild and agreeable. It’s as if winter can’t quite commit to being winter anymore.

This seasonal simplification has turned weather small talk – that great lubricant of human interaction – into an even more absurd exercise. “Hot enough for you?” has become less of a question and more of a year-round greeting from July through October. Weather apps have become less useful for planning and more like reality shows we check compulsively to see what plot twist Mother Nature has in store for us next.

Our closets have become year-round storage units for clothes of all seasons because who knows when you’ll need that parka or those shorts? The old advice to dress in layers has taken on new meaning when you might need all four seasons’ worth of clothing in a single week.

Perhaps this is nature’s way of simplifying things for our overwhelmed modern lives. Who has time for four seasons anyway? In an age of binary choices – left or right, yes or no, like or dislike – maybe it’s fitting that our years have been reduced to a simple toggle between Summer and Not-Summer.

But for those of us who grew up with the rhythm of four distinct seasons, there’s something bittersweet about this simplification. It’s like watching a complex symphony being reduced to a two-note song.

In the end, maybe we should embrace this new binary reality. After all, it makes packing for trips easier – just bring everything. And hey, at least we’ve still got two seasons. Give it a few more years, and we might just end up with one long season called Weather.