You’ve Got To Be Kidding

One thing I learned moving to Southern California from the Midwest is given the human condition we find ourselves capable of complaining about nearly anything.  In my first month here I learned some natives wish there were more cloudy days.  All right, sunshine may get a little tedious at times.  Then, someone started complaining about the humidity. In this part of the country humidity, if you can call it that, arrives in winter.  Most of the time it hovers in the seventy to eighty percent range. When it reaches ninety people start to complain and threaten to leave for the dry lands of Arizona or Nevada (only later did I learn those places have monsoons). Most summers in the Midwest the humidity hovers in the low nineties and in the South its almost always-pushing one hundred percent. The concept of stickiness never really arrived in California before the invention of polyester.

Photo courtesy of DebbieDoesPhotography.Blogspot.Com

Another complaint heard from those who migrated here from other regions is the lack of four seasons. Now, that’s ridiculous. Anyone who looks up on the six days the smog isn’t blocking the view of the mountains can tell you the peaks have snow on them in the winter.  In fact, if you venture up to the higher elevations, even if you don’t plan on skiing, you are likely to find snow on the ground, a true testament to winter existing in Southern California.  The other seasons are a little subtler.

Photo courtesy of DebbieDoesPhotography.Blogspot.Com

For instance, the temperature in fall plummets from the eighties and occasional ninety-degree days of summer to a much cooler seventy degrees.  Instead of forests filled with color, there are eight liquid ambers (I think it’s a designer maple created especially for trendy Californians) that lose their leaves and the dozen people whose lawns are covered, myself included, complain vigorously about having to rake.

There are definitely more clues to the arrival of spring. For those individuals into racing the tracks open for a new season, and if you prefer the four-wheel kind the city of Long Beach hosts an impressive Grand Prix. Of course there is the start of our national pastime with three major league teams—the Dodgers, Angels and Padres—holding their home openers during the last two weeks.

Unlike the rest of the country where spring brings rain and life to the earth, it marks the end of our wet season and a return to irrigation both in farmers’ fields and urban landscapes.  Being in the third year of a drought the desire to see more rain fill up water tables and reservoirs finds Southern Californians petitioning to extend the season before they start complaining about restrictions on the days and amount of water they can provide their lawns.

The rebirth of nature inspires many lines of poetry, one of my favorites being:

Spring has sprung

The grass has riz

Oh, how pretty

The flowers is

Photo courtesy of DebbieDoesPhotography.Blogspot.Com

While the change in temperature is less drastic with thermometers moving from highs in the upper sixties and low seventies into the mid-seventies and low eighties, we always run a chance for an early preview of summer, like we did earlier this week.  When the warmth of the sun caused me to open my windows and the mercury (do they still use the stuff in conventional thermometers; I’m just too digital) touched ninety, my wife first moved to the shade and a short while later came inside complaining it was too hot. You’ve got to be kidding.