Commentary: No, Brian, as lovely as our weather can be, it’s never dull in SoCal

To my friend Brian in England, who asked, “Don’t you get bored of all that perfect weather?”, I’m replying that fall came in like a lamb and is roaring along like a lion.

Or perhaps I should say like “roast lamb” as one of the season’s most vivid memories is looking to the west from our deck as evening came on and seeing a rapidly intensifying orange glow behind the nearby hills and then, boom! a line of flames, deep red and yellow, coming over the ridge, silhouetted against the dark sky, devouring in minutes all the flammable growth around and dying down just as quickly.

A period of weather followed so cool that the pool temperature dropped almost 20 degrees from the lovely warm bath of summer and I put away my shorts — no loss there, it was not a pretty sight, in fact it was downright offensive. But almost immediately, it seemed, came a period of scorching heat that kept me in my burrow most of the day.

The nights were delicious, however, not a hint of chill and/or a breath of wind and I sat outside till late with a book but without the cloud of pesky creatures gathering round the light that ruffle the pleasure of outdoor reading after dark almost everywhere else I’ve lived.

How far all this is from the “season of mellow fruitfulness” that John Keats has made the ideal for autumn for the last 200 years.

And now those warm wonderful winds, well, wonderful for a hiker pushing against the elements, if not for the weary-looking firefighters, who have had to face gusts of over 100 miles per hour trying to contain the outbreak on Mt. Wilson. When I was in high school, the geography teacher tried to get us to believe that the warm south wind, the Sirocco, was so strong and sustained that it carried sand from the Sahara and dumped it in Europe. None of us took him seriously.

But one morning in a seaside town in Sicily not long ago, I looked out of the hotel window and saw red African sand covering all the parked cars. Today’s winds brought a similar taste of the exotic to familiar views, a reminder of the scorching, and at one time almost impassible, desert a few miles to the north.

So, no, Brian, it’s not dull. And we aren’t even into the monsoon yet.

Reg Green lives in La Cañada Flintridge. Contact him via www.nicholasgreen.org