Just a few days ago, while city-sidewalk exercise walking, I saw something strange (for November) on the flower of a potted plant: a monarch butterfly.

I stopped for a minute and watched its nectar drinking. The butterfly gave the impression of being in no rush, as if having reached the end of a long journey, so much so that I started to say: “No, you’re not there yet! Although it’s warm; this isn’t really Mexico!” (but kept it to myself).

I sometimes hum tunes from different lands while walking, but took special care while paused and watching that particular monarch not to hum anything of a “Latin” nature, so as to not cause further confusion.

The next anomaly I encountered was a vine of honeysuckle growing out of horizontally trimmed shrubbery, the honeysuckle having missed the trimming and now proceeding along in its own geometric “freestyle.” I’m no expert botanist, able to identify honeysuckle by its leaf, but I didn’t have to be, as this super-tenacious plant pest was still abloom in mid-November!

And speaking of pests, just the day before, at the picnic tables of the science museum where I work, kids were having to do something they do in summer and spring: shoo away (primarily run from) yellow jackets. These potentially painful insects had been drawn to sugary liquid spilled from fruit sippers. (Every technological advancement still has its flaws.)

I saw deciduous trees whose leaves were still green, although many of their brethren had fallen in the “seasonal” war. It was almost as if they were envious of pine and cedar, holding on to hopefully say at Christmastime: “I’m still green, decorate me! I’m a Tannenbaum wannabe.”

It was almost mid-November and the temperature was in the lower 70s, seeming as like “phony fall,” reminiscent of the “Phoney War” of 1939-40 (that eight month period in which England and France were at war with Germany but no fighting was yet happening.

The “dog days” of summer seemed to have spawned some “pups” well into fall’s allotted time.

I do recall an unusually warm Halloween back in the very late 1950s when I went from house to house in a section of the Old Concord Road as a ghost suffering from a sub-sheet “night sweat.”

Such periods of heat’s incursion into cold’s temporal domain, and cold’s incursion into the time of heat are fondly referred to by the weathermen as “see-saw weather.” (Just as an aside, the sound of “see-saw” reminds me of my late wife’s grandmother, who when watching a string orchestra performing on a television show, would say: “They’re sawing again.”)

As far as unseasonal weather goes, an out-of place “warm takeover” is always the preferred one, as the opposite leads to increase in the heating bill (man-made heat being never free).

The spring warmth combined with beautiful red sand yellows of fall to make an imitation of the colors of spring, but since these were only changed leaves, not blooming flowers, there was no botanical “sex” for procreation involved.

The long-lasting warmth had been an “icebreaker” of conversation, as far as the checkout counter at Food Lion and other businesses are concerned.

The repeated stating of, and listening to the phrase: “But it’s good for the heating bill,” makes us all seem to be afflicted with conversational “fugue.”

When the squiggly graphed line representing temperature makes its inevitable, deepest plunge in January and February, we will look back on the “November spring,” its “toasty” memory bringing some psychological warmth, if nothing else.

At the end of my walk, I thought about the earth’s polar slant which makes the seasons possible. Then I remembered its slow, 25,000-year “precession” like a slow wobbling top which eventually assigns “North Star” status to other stars besides Polaris (when the pyramids were being built, the holder of the title was the star “Thuban” in the constellation “Draco the Dragon.”

It seemed that the slightest of wobble had made this “top” turn back to spring. Thinking about it reminded me of a top being a young child’s typical Christmas toy and a dradle being kind of its Hannukah equivalent, toys for “seasons” other than the ones prescribed by the great, underfoot, spinning “top.”