Raking In Those Subtle Signs of Fall

Head still on his pillow, my husband turned in my direction and said, in that bedroom voice of his, “You know, the air feels a little nippy this morning.”

Over on my side of the bed, I turned my head to the wall and asked myself plaintively, in my most world-weary Peggy Lee voice, “Is that all there is?

“Is that all there is,” I continued, “to autumn in Southern California? A little nippy? A little snap to the air? Maybe a little too brisk to retrieve the morning paper from the driveway in one’s underwear?

“What--no glorious autumn leaves of red and gold drifting by my window?”

Even worse, with the arrival of fall last week, I remembered that I was probably going to be forced to listen, for another year, to three or four sanctimonious, condescending Easterners on public television wax poetic in their annual, predictable song and dance about California being--”you know--OK--but you people just don’t have seasons out there.”

Like a bunch of dead leaves just makes their supercilious year.

If you want a fall foliage tour, aim the leaf blower at a eucalyptus tree.

There are plenty, plenty of signs that fall has arrived in Southern California. But these signs are probably a little too subtle for, say, New Yorkers, who still need the big, gaudy gesture such as a couple billion leaves drifting by their cramped little apartment windows.

Southern Californians recognize the subtleties.

We know that fall is here:

* When the weatherman begins to warn us about “mild Santa Ana” conditions instead of “early morning marine layer” conditions. And when the first of those invigorating east winds drops the humidity to 2%, and the air crackles with static electricity, our hair doesn’t need gel to look like Mary’s in “There’s Something About Mary.”

* When surfers start wearing wet suits again.

* When we look in the closet and say to ourselves, “Time to get that light sweater out.”

* When the Christmas decorations go up on the palm trees in the mall.

* When the skateboarders in their gravity-defying shorts don’t hit the streets until school lets out for the day. They still dress like they did in summer, of course. A skateboarder in a Windbreaker is as rare as a condor in Oxnard.

* When all mothers’ children come home from school with colds and pass them on to mother.

* When men still see no reason to put on a coat and tie. Every day is casual Friday for a Southern California guy.

* When you begin to quarrel about what temperature the thermostat should be set at. At least in the foothills.

* When, unfortunately, my bird of paradise plant begins producing fewer blossoms. And to be honest, the bougainvillea vines and the banana leaves are starting to look a little tired.

Of course, these are not the seasonal signs they are seeing in Ohio right now, where the basement furnace rumbles on earlier every day, where they are telling themselves it’s time to put up the storm windows, and where they can see their breath when they pick up the morning paper off the driveway in their parkas.

Out here, instead of mounting storm windows, we are clearing our hillsides in preparation for the forest fires that our hot, dry Santa Anas will make so welcome.

And if fire season is right around the corner, every good Californian knows that flood season can’t be far behind. Don’t you just love the thrup-thrup-thrup of news helicopters overhead during a flood?

But fall also means that the navel oranges are almost ripe on the vine.

Is this a great state or what?

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Brenda Loree is a freelance writer who lives in Ventura.