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California hills in winter
Jan. 31st, 2003 01:20 pmThere's a corner of Bay Street, up near campus, where I can see California.
Northern California is a strange place to be at this time of year, an opposition of winter and spring. Rainstorms and sun fight through January and February, and within half an hour one can gain the advantage. I've left my house wearing sandals on a sunny day and arrived at class with feet wet from melting hail.
The ornamental plums and the acacias are blooming and it smells like spring; the Japanese maples and the birches are completely bare, just the skeletons of trees, and they look like cold winters. The hills are covered in tall dry grasses, the summer grasses that make climbing hills such a dusty chore for some who can't imagine hills without green, the summer grasses that set dark California oaks in relief against a field of gold. Underneath the dry grass that still smells of sweet, dusty summers fine green grasses have pushed up from the ground; from a distance, some hills are a light, young-growth green, and others a golden green of young and old grasses. There are tall, dark coastal redwoods, clean from the rain, and tall, strange, out-of-place date palms, growing next to each other, fronds and needles brushing and dancing together in the wind.
There's a corner of Bay Street, up near campus, where the grass is coming up in sweet young growths cropped by mellow deer, where acacias are blooming next to sparse, naked maples, where redwoods are standing tall and stately, shading the hill, and where just a few steps away a palm tree is filtering the sun into bright shafts. The damp grass steams where the sun hits it, and a warm flowering spring is only two steps away from the dark shaded winter.
Northern California is a strange place to be at this time of year, an opposition of winter and spring. Rainstorms and sun fight through January and February, and within half an hour one can gain the advantage. I've left my house wearing sandals on a sunny day and arrived at class with feet wet from melting hail.
The ornamental plums and the acacias are blooming and it smells like spring; the Japanese maples and the birches are completely bare, just the skeletons of trees, and they look like cold winters. The hills are covered in tall dry grasses, the summer grasses that make climbing hills such a dusty chore for some who can't imagine hills without green, the summer grasses that set dark California oaks in relief against a field of gold. Underneath the dry grass that still smells of sweet, dusty summers fine green grasses have pushed up from the ground; from a distance, some hills are a light, young-growth green, and others a golden green of young and old grasses. There are tall, dark coastal redwoods, clean from the rain, and tall, strange, out-of-place date palms, growing next to each other, fronds and needles brushing and dancing together in the wind.
There's a corner of Bay Street, up near campus, where the grass is coming up in sweet young growths cropped by mellow deer, where acacias are blooming next to sparse, naked maples, where redwoods are standing tall and stately, shading the hill, and where just a few steps away a palm tree is filtering the sun into bright shafts. The damp grass steams where the sun hits it, and a warm flowering spring is only two steps away from the dark shaded winter.
