Jacarandas: Southland’s Sentinels of Summer

One day, maybe two weeks ago, I caught myself concocting reasons to drive up and down this certain street near my home. It’s an ordinary street, really, lined with little ranch houses of the sort that sport jaunty porch flags. I don’t know a soul on it. Still, vaguely driven, I drove.

I drove it on the way to the jeweler to see whether my pearls were restrung yet. I drove home, pearl-less, via the same route. I used it as a detour to get to the Starbucks for a latte that got cold in the cup holder while I detoured back past those same little ranch houses with their same jaunty porch flags.

Every time, at a certain juncture, I looked up.

I looked up, and every time, there was the same, lonesome answer.

I must mention here that this street is flanked by old jacaranda trees. For block upon block, they formed a vista that by Memorial Day should have been a heavenly, fluttering, blue-violet tunnel.

But nope. No heaven. No fluttering. No blue-violet. Just jagged branches, crisscrossed against the sky.

It didn’t help that that sky was as thin and cold as old scrub water. It didn’t help that some guy on the radio was talking about “June gloom.” It didn’t even help when I braked in mid-block and craned my head out the window, Mr. Magoo-like, scanning for the purple buds that always signal late spring and the sweet euphoria, soon now, of summer.

Summer, the jagged trees regretted to inform me, would not be coming soon.

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Faithful readers will forgive this Monday weather story, probably because they’re faithful. Which their correspondent, frankly, was not. There was a time when I would have snickered snidely at the Southern Californian who pined for signs of almost-summer. Since when is it ever not almost summer here? The whole place is a sign of almost-summer.

Except.

Except for what I didn’t know then, which is the way seasons here are more about mood than weather, more about the shifting fronts of the flesh and the heart.

Maybe this is why Southern Californians talk about their weather so meaningfully, as if there were some message between the fine print of the forecasts.

Seasons may be as close as this shy paradise can come to experiencing its own beauty. Weather is communion: the sound of fat raindrops plopping on the leaves of the Valencia orange tree at night in December. The smell of tar and surf wax and cocoa butter at Trestles on the last hot day of fall.

And in June, it’s the promise of euphoria, soon now, the communion of great, whopping flower beds and sweaty, T-ball-playing children and carloads of teenagers out too late with only a few school nights left. The heat and perfume and blue-violet treetops make a kind of faith that people rely on, that reminds them to flirt and buy patio furniture and go on the Internet to look up the e-mail addresses of old lovers. That says: Summer hasn’t forgotten you. Not yet.

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For days and days, the bare jacarandas were the bane of my suburban landscape. I called City Hall to find out if they had some kind of jacaranda flu. The receptionist put me on hold and I hung up, feeling like a crackpot.

It was obvious why they weren’t blooming: This year’s spring had brought barely a glimmer of its usual warmth and sunshine. Fat raindrops were plopping on the Valencia orange tree--in June.

The absence seemed a metaphor for everything that had lately made everyone yearn for summer. Hadn’t the entire spring been unnaturally cruel? Bombs abroad, bombs in schools--so many unthinkable things were suddenly so thinkable. So many landscapes were so jagged and cold.

Maybe euphoria was for carloads of teenagers. Maybe it was time to forget the anticipation of summer and move on. So more days passed--days on which nothing changed and the news remained cruel and the worst remained thinkable--and I concocted reasons not to drive on that certain street.

Days passed and then one day--a day when nothing had changed and the news remained cruel and the worst remained thinkable--I drove by that street, and there were beads of blue-violet, opening almost faster than I could make them out.

The world can be hard as a closed fist; all that you count on can fade and betray you. And still, the promise of summer opens, opens now above you, fluttering toward your faithless heart.

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Shawn Hubler’s column runs Mondays and Thursdays. Her e-mail address is shawn.hubler@latimes.com.