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In Connecticut, a morning in January and a morning in March don’t look too different when you look outside for help with what you should wear that day. Usually it’s bright and there’s often unplowed white on the sidewalks and people shuffling in layers. Even if there aren’t, you know enough about this coast to know that your scarf is not accessory but requisite. I came here from California, where warmth is numbing. Here winter occupies half the year, and the seasons are stitched together. Sometime in April someone starts pulling the thread. White turns to gray to yellow, a familiar and welcome flow. As capricious as the outside can be, even if it’s cold when sunny or if twenty degrees separate two consecutive days, we sense its character. And so, the oft elusive weather becomes part of our concrete knowledge.

This is why, when testing a patient’s cognitive function, we ask them what season it is. It’s supposed to come naturally. Our patient is seventy-eight, and the deeply pressed lines of her face change what I consider natural. As she furrows her forehead in an effort to find the “right” answers that she so badly wants to give us, the rain falls steadily harder outside. Watching her sit and speak in front of the weather, the bus ride we took to the nursing home feels farther away in time. I’m suddenly aware of my socks wetly clinging to the inside of my shoes.

When asked, our patient tells us the correct month—April. It’s only when she says this that I realize how far into the year we are. Only a couple weeks ago stacks of muddy ice tinged with white still created tunnels on the street. Not so long did thirty degrees feel warm. At some point in that winter the snow glazed over and made a varnish still visible at night and worthy of ice skating. During the day a friend commented that he liked how bright it was, when the snow was fresh and the sun piercing. This year it all ebbed into spring slowly so there was no time for embrace or longing. But we still remember.

When then asked what season it is, the woman sharing with us her presence hesitates. She doesn’t consult the window behind her, even though I look past her to the outside. Instead she looks ahead and I wonder at what or for. I think the sound of her delicately mouthed April has faded. Then she says, “fall,” and I think our insides break a little.

Would she have known, if we had been sitting outside to let the falling water slip off our cheeks, rest in her creases? What if the season had been the stronger one of few weeks past, and she could hear the salted snow stuck in the grooves of our shoe soles as we walked across the room to her? Or if she’d walked long enough for the water to seep into her socks? It’s out of grasp to feel what touches her, much less link sense with thought.

And fall here is not far from spring, anyway; what does it mean to mix and match transitions? It’s solemn on the ride back to school. My classmate sitting next to me confesses some depression over what he’s seen. In not these exact words he says that life is for interaction with experience, and to not know your experience takes away purpose. It’s funny to me that this sounds and is often true, when I came to medical school with the purpose of meeting experience.

But our windows tell us little, and what we feel of the outside is inexplicable. For the woman giving us her words, the layers of expression have been shed, and the experience left so bare that it’s gone from our view. Without even the frayed threads of winter past to twist around her fingers, it’s still spring.