We got our first soaking rain of the season on the day before Thanksgiving. Then we started watching the hillsides. We didn't have to watch long. By Monday after Thanksgiving, there it was: grass.
Well, not grass, really. In Southern California, wherever a hillside is brown on Thanksgiving and a fuzzy, deceptively adorable (like lion cubs) green four days later, what you are viewing is the birth of weeds. Cute now, but wait till they grow up.
The weeds have been down there for months below the brown surface, meeting in their seed communities and grumbling about the long wait. If there is any living thing who looks forward to a nice rain more than I do, it is a Southern California weed seed. When November arrives, you can put your ear to the ground and hear them rumbling down there, desperate in their instinctive drive to come roaring out of the ground.
And now here they are, in the first week of December, loosed upon us, giving the landscape a green sheen that regular human beings associate with a spring month like April. Intruding into our dreamy considerations of cozy fires and Christmas scents and togetherness is a Scroogian voice whose annual mission is to nag us until we go down to the garage with a broom and sweep the cobwebs off the weedwhacker.
I have lived now in Southern California for 36 years and I have yet to digest the idea of pulling out the weedwacker in December. From Texas, where seasons are normal, I moved into an upside-down world, where December is the busiest month for the lawnmower repair man.
Actually, I moved into a coastal desert next to a cold-water ocean. It is not a fruitful combination for rainmaking. For rain to fall in Southern California, mammoth weather systems have to be spawned over Alaska at just the right moment to catch a ride on the jet stream when it decides to sag southward. Even in our rainy season November to March, rain is a chancy event. Ours is a culture that stirs like cattle at the low thunder issuing from the Weather Bureau warning that this next storm is likely to be a killer. There is never a stampede. We know in our collective brain herd that there's no storm out there. The No. 1 parody headline in Southern California newspapers is: "Killer Storm Looms."
But the quarter-inch the clouds do manage to squeeze onto us is enough to create chaos on the freeways and bring the weeds roaring out of the ground. If you think nothing grows in the desert, just put a little water on it. In a week, you'll have a golf course. Or a hillside of baby weeds. By the Rose Bowl, they'll be waist-high. I'll pull out the weedwacker when I pull out the Christmas decorations.
Well, not grass, really. In Southern California, wherever a hillside is brown on Thanksgiving and a fuzzy, deceptively adorable (like lion cubs) green four days later, what you are viewing is the birth of weeds. Cute now, but wait till they grow up.
The weeds have been down there for months below the brown surface, meeting in their seed communities and grumbling about the long wait. If there is any living thing who looks forward to a nice rain more than I do, it is a Southern California weed seed. When November arrives, you can put your ear to the ground and hear them rumbling down there, desperate in their instinctive drive to come roaring out of the ground.
And now here they are, in the first week of December, loosed upon us, giving the landscape a green sheen that regular human beings associate with a spring month like April. Intruding into our dreamy considerations of cozy fires and Christmas scents and togetherness is a Scroogian voice whose annual mission is to nag us until we go down to the garage with a broom and sweep the cobwebs off the weedwhacker.
I have lived now in Southern California for 36 years and I have yet to digest the idea of pulling out the weedwacker in December. From Texas, where seasons are normal, I moved into an upside-down world, where December is the busiest month for the lawnmower repair man.
Actually, I moved into a coastal desert next to a cold-water ocean. It is not a fruitful combination for rainmaking. For rain to fall in Southern California, mammoth weather systems have to be spawned over Alaska at just the right moment to catch a ride on the jet stream when it decides to sag southward. Even in our rainy season November to March, rain is a chancy event. Ours is a culture that stirs like cattle at the low thunder issuing from the Weather Bureau warning that this next storm is likely to be a killer. There is never a stampede. We know in our collective brain herd that there's no storm out there. The No. 1 parody headline in Southern California newspapers is: "Killer Storm Looms."
But the quarter-inch the clouds do manage to squeeze onto us is enough to create chaos on the freeways and bring the weeds roaring out of the ground. If you think nothing grows in the desert, just put a little water on it. In a week, you'll have a golf course. Or a hillside of baby weeds. By the Rose Bowl, they'll be waist-high. I'll pull out the weedwacker when I pull out the Christmas decorations.
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