Adjusting to Summer Cold

It's really summer now.  Wherever you are, the weather is wrapping itself around you in its own special way. Here, where the  western edge of the Northern Hemisphere is also called California, nothing unusual is going on. No tornadoes, no blazing fires borne on high-speed winds, and no humidity. The nothingness of our summer has settled in.  Come here. Take a break from all that extreme stuff and cool off for a while. We love visitors, especially ones with red sweaty faces and puffy ankles who live in inland areas where it's so darned hot.  I think I remember heat.  And sunshine.  Round bright thing in the sky, right?

I try to explain why we get this gray fog all summer on the coast. Sometimes I make some sense as I try to explain low pressure and high pressure, cold ocean and inland heat. There's no denying that we wear sweaters in the summer and that only ten miles away (6 k for my readers outside the US), the heat is much more noticeable and the summer much more, um, summery.  I have to go there for a summer-weather fix because it sure doesn't come here.

When I was a small child growing up in Carmel Valley - 12 miles inland from Carmel - I was content to remain right where I was. When I looked west in the afternoons, I could see a hideous gray wall of engulfing fog, a misery that made no sense to go near. I spent my summers shoeless and in the pool, chlorinated and tan. The fog bank caused, and of course still causes, an afternoon wind to pick up in inland valleys, but we were protected from it by a weather ceiling that lifted about 6 miles from Carmel in the area called Farm Center (a local's name for a small shopping center).

"Do you kids want to go with me to Carmel today?" my mother would ask entreatingly.

"NO!!!!" would come the instant yell from five throats.  No way, too awful, cold and gray.  I'd always end up shivering and having to wear two layers of clothes at the beach.  Beaches were for idiots as far as I knew, idiots who liked sand fleas, kelp and 50 degree water. I did not buy into the idea that girls wore bikinis to beaches anywhere. It was a lie.

So, here I am living in a place like Carmel, but not as precious as it is or self-indulgent, and I am wrapped in a cold gray expanse of featureless weather all summer long.  Sometimes I can't wait for the summer to pass; it's never short enough now.

So the real question is:  Why do I live here if the summers are so miserable?  I'm making a list of pros and cons, and the cons are starting to make more sense - at least in the summer.  The rest of the year?  That's a different story.

Spring Warmth At Last

It has been chilly here on the Central Coast lately.  The sun comes out, but you still need a sweater. It's kite flying weather. So, it being cool, the growth of my garden flowers has been slowed. That is, until today. Warmth and moisture makes almost anything grow, and when there is finally a series of warm days, flowers burst into bloom and plants go into super-grow mode.

Rosebuds I'd been anticipating opening for a few days are finally unfurling, some at a rate nearly visible to the naked eye.  No time-lapse photography needed.  The roots are warming, the sap is flowing and plants are using energy at a tremendous rate.  After this first flush of blooming, I'll trim them back a bit and fertilize again.

A woman and her husband who got sick of industrial-grade produce went off to the countryside in the midwest and bought 30 acres of land to begin a farm.  She researched the steps she needed to take by scrutinizing every article she could find on the internet and has made a success of the effort so far.  Her kids complained, it is said, about having real chores to do every day, day in and day out, but now they're stronger and have more real skills.  The woman said, "Life doesn't happen in 30-minute increments. It happens in seasons!"

One's gardening and growing effort has to be continuous and driven by the plants themselves. A careful eye must be kept on shoots, suckers, insects, watering, and feeding or the previous 80 or 90 days' work is all for nothing.

Nothing surprises a gardener or farmer more than seeing the immense bounty from the farm or garden once it's in the house.  I have one container of herbs that is producing enough for many families to use, far more than we need.

So, I saw the flowers' blossoms exploding open around me today, the sun bright overhead and then the wind galloping across the open bay in the distance, kicking up whitecaps as it came.  As the days grow longer until June, extended periods of warmth will produce even more flowers and growth than I'm enjoying now.  Hard to imagine since the garden's already flush with color, shape and texture.

Beauty at Sunrise: A Gift

The sun was coming up over the eastern hills beyond Salinas and Hollister as I journeyed north on Saturday. Tentative at first, then bolder, light rays burst forth from beyond the Gabilan Hills and danced across the tips of branch stems and wingtips to the ocean of Monterey Bay.  The beaming light set small hills, ridge tops and marshes in sharp relief and revealed new details of farmlands I had driven past hundreds of times before.  Distances between things seemed lengthened as their forms became more distinctly gold-edged.  The slanting light was as if shot parallel to the ground from a stage light even as the sky overhead was a dark gray-blue.  All things, slumbering in a darkened world moments before, pulsed newly alive.  

Dove-white clouds drifting in a piled mass were a collage of pastel streaks that looked soft as fine wool. Long glancing beams outlined the landscape for miles and miles, a diorama of cool winter, gilt-edged, with dark wet earth and gray-brown tree trunks brooding and still.  Beautiful?  It seems such a weak word now.  It was the kind of beauty that brings the heart to a standstill, the mind struggling to grasp such an exquisite thing as a winter sunrise after rainfall.

Drive north from Monterey some morning as the night sky pales into daylight.  Take the coastal, bay-skirting route or go more inland where the rolling undulations of San Benito County stretch from one horizon to the next.  The open land lies in repose, as it has for nearly all time. It is lovely and gentle, tender and complex.  It is a heartland, a centering place of graceful and timeless beauty.  Where oaks, laurel and buckeye trees growing on the hills' flanks have both a delicate texture and a sensual undulating roundness.  

Get up before dawn in winter, drive out away from loud, stinking towns and cities into California's curving beauty and watch how wet leaves and arching branches of old oaks catch the sunrise and give it to you like the beautiful gift that it is, not speaking, but singing a sweet enduring melody.  Like as not, your heart already knows the song, doesn't it.