High in the Northern Alps of Japan there are snowfields in August. Up above the tree line, wherever the bare geology dips into cirques, thick blankets of dirty white stretch out between the peaks and jagged ridges like caught clouds.
In summer, these mountains are a patchwork of green, white, and exposed tawny rock. In winter, they are meters deep in snow, smoothly fondant-frosted. But in between, in October, crimsoned foliage brocades the slopes and the snowfields have receded to leave only the unmelted slivers of winters past — some centuries old, perhaps — in the shadowed clefts and recesses where erosion and glaciation have incised and ground away the rock.
Memory works in much the same way.