A car salesman once told me that in Hawai'i, cars need their air conditioners repaired three or four times as often as cars on the Mainland. The AC, he explained, is meant to be used only for two or three months a year — but in Hawai'i, we use it all 12. "You'd save a lot on car-repair bills," he said disapprovingly, "if you had seasons."

Someone else once asked me how I knew time was passing if every day was just like the last. I used to think it myself.

Shorts weather all year round has its bonuses, but life in paradise can be kind of a bummer when you're a kid. Picture book illustrators take great joy in painting spring daffodils, or bare trees under a winter moon with a snowy owl swooping down. Every house had a chimney on it. Kids in books march into the forest with an axe to choose and chop down their Christmas pine. We had to wait for the Christmas tree ship to come in and line up at Holiday Mart — and nobody, as far as I know, has made a picture book about that.

Yes, life was hard. No fall colors. No geese flying south in picturesque Vs for the winter. And no snow: so no snowmen, snowball fights, or winter wardrobes — gloves, hats, scarves, coats. I sometimes wonder whether Hawai'i's Home Depots go into a sales funk every November because we don't have to buy any of the sheer volume and variety of stuff a cold winter brings with it: snow shovels, snow chains, patio heaters, de-icers for the locks on your car, little frost blankets for your asparagus.

And you'd think that wood fires, except possibly in Koke'e and Volcano, would be right out.

But it's not just me and the picture book illustrators who have yearned for extremes of temperature that just don't materialize here. If you ever want a "What were they thinking?" moment, count the number of houses, especially in older districts, that have a chimney sticking out of the roof. My aunt and uncle, who have lived in a house with a fireplace for more than a decade, lit a fire last year for the first time. What happened? A cozy game of chess in the glow of the crackling flame? "We stayed up all night. We couldn't go to bed until the logs burned down," said my aunt. "And the house got really, really, really hot."

But if we don't have normal seasons, hardly anybody else does, either. When spring comes in the Southwest, the arroyos flood and the ocotillo cactus blooms. You can sweat in the moss-hung bayous of Louisiana right into November. And summer isn't all wine and roses; June and July are also biting blackfly season in the Great Lakes. Most of America's West Coast is subject to bone-chilling summer fogs. Normal? Not exactly. That's what makes these places real and unique.

I get a kick out of imagining car salesmen in Alaska telling their customers that their heaters break down so often because they don't have seasons like everybody else.

And I've learned to watch what's actually happening. Hawai'i is the place birds fly to in the winter. Every August, I wait for our golden plover, the same one every year, to make his mind-boggling 3,000-mile, 48-hour flight from somewhere in the Arctic to our yard. The winter rains begin, the waves rise on the North Shore, and the surf contests go into high gear. From Magic Island, my favorite sunset-watching spot, the sun sets in summer over the Wai'anae Range, and in winter it swings out over the sea. The wide, flat horizon makes each winter evening a prime opportunity to see the green flash.

Traffic patterns change, too. The school dropoffs and pickups are well under way, and soon there will be long tailbacks of football-season lights to the stadium.

The humpback whales arrive in December to give birth and raise their young, and with them come the whalewatchers.

I'll know that spring is here, not when the daffodils bloom, but when I have to reach for the Allergan. Our fruit trees may not have the showy blossoms of cherries and plums, but my sinuses sure as hell can tell when they're giving off pollen, and my tastebuds look forward to the ample summer reward of mangoes and lychees.

The days will keep getting hotter well into September, but for me, the end of summer is already here.

From time to time, I get a craving for chestnuts roasted over an open fire. Luckily, Shirokiya sells them every winter, ready peeled.

Lavonne Leong, a Honolulu resident, is a writer and editor. She wrote this commentary for The Advertiser.