Seasonal Thoughts

I am trying to write myself out of the heat. I’m thinking cold, icy thoughts, wind-chill, frost, brr, remembering those January days back east with gusts in my face and icy sidewalks waiting for a lawsuit. Scarves and earmuffs, three sweaters, galoshes and gloves. I’m feeling better already. If this doesn’t work, there’s always Costco’s room like an ice-hotel where berries and grapes stay happily preserved.       

Here in Southern California, we have no weather, at least none by the coast. Morning fog is transient. Santa Ana winds usually stay inland. The result is a collective outrage when our Fahrenheit numbers climb above eighty or dip under sixty. Seasons are rumors. We live between sixty-five and seventy-five the year round. In sweltering days such as we now have, I long for those chilly scenes of winter in which I probably dreamed about these long, hot summers where I am now yearning for the gulags where my ancestors were likely banished.  

My tolerance for cold is shamelessly low. Maybe I have what the old Geritol commercial called iron-poor blood, a short step to no blood at all. Cold nights are exacerbated by one of the most dreaded and least talked-about maladies known to mankind; namely, creeping-sleeve syndrome, or even worse, creeping-leg syndrome in which my pajamas creep up my several extremities on their own accord. Further research is called for.

The fact is, we are spoiled. We’ve lost touch with the elements. Christmas brings out Styrofoam snow and fake icicles. Palm trees have no foliage season. However, we do have wildflowers painting the desert floor; a little rain wouldn’t hurt.

The cycles of nature have been relocated within. When Wallace Stevens wrote about having a mind of winter it suggests a state of mind detached from our own baggage yet immersed in the reality of the barren field. Winter is the last in the cycle; the dying of the light, as Dylan Thomas described it. Not necessarily Death but a sense of desolation or a period to in-dwell. Pagans noted the diminished light and organized religion ritualized the early darkness with compensatory candles from menorahs to decking the halls.    

Which brings me back to our sizzling September still in the mind of summer. The full flowering of us. A time to frolic with sunscreen protecting us from the bacchanal of cancer cells. Light fare of beach books and summer movies…whatever that may mean. No worries, mate, the seasons run on time even if trains don’t. We’re all part of the great recycling. Have a peach before they grow mealy or a drink with one of those mini-umbrellas. We have over-cooked our planet. We ordered medium-rare and got ourselves not well-done but burned.