spring in the bay.

there's something about the Bay in the spring that's just magical. usually people associate spring with april, may; flowers bees sunshine and puppylove. if you lived in so-cal, you associated it with bigger crowds at the beach and the beginning of the hot days (not that it's ever COLD in san diego...). it's something different here, though.

for one thing, it starts in late january. i can't really draw the line between winter and spring very well, except i guess the spring (this year at least) is wetter and greener. winter's sort of a brittle time, lots of really fucking cold days with a crystalline blue sky above (see Blue for details), and a glaring white sun that doesn't seem to give any heat at all.

not that it's a bad time. there's something magical about winter in the bay, too. something about the crispness everything gets endowed with, like it was all flash-frozen and preserved. like everything's edged out for you by some cosmic exacto knife.

but then the spring comes and things go green. the hills, in particular. near the bay, the mountains that divide the coast from the central valley start getting carpeted in this sort of long wildgrass that, oddly enough, is gold in its maturity. it's not really DEAD - it comes back again. it's like grain. it turns colors. so summertime comes and all the hills are this glorious yellow-gold color (the fabled mountains of gold), but before that there's this very transient week or month or so when it's wet enough that the new grasses wake up and start pushing out. and then everything's green like you wouldn't believe under a heavy grey sky.

people associate green grass with blue skies. greenery, all sorts of it, is always cooler under a rainy sky.

i don't really know where i'm going with this. heh. thought i should write it down, though, because these days, every time i walk outside, i'm always thinking to myself, shit, gotta write this down, this experience, these sights.

so here they are, in no particular order other than that i remember them in:

the clouds rolling over the east bay hills, which are round and tree'd in ways so-cal hills never, ever are, and which are also green for that magical time of early-spring. the wispiness of those clouds, which become fog as they graze the tops of the mountains and pour down - or maybe mist. the way the trees show through them, the color of the sky.

the color of rain, the color of the sea, which turns silver, in the rain. the color of the afternoon. the pink and white cherry blossoms against the dark slender trunks and branches, which look so much like the limbs of a girl, especially when it rains and they're sleek and wet, that i don't wonder anymore why daphne turned into a tree.

the concrete wet with rain. the busses going past. the rain falling; the wind; the sun through the clouds. the clouds are different here in the bay; there's no real line between clouds and mist and fog. i think i mentioned this earlier, above. but they're all the same. it all depends on where you stand. the clouds are softer here, less defined, less...integrated?

the golden gate bridge stretched across the bay. the bay bridge. the city and its lights. berkeley's campanile. the sound of the traffic. the sound of the rain.

the thing about springtime in the bay is that it's not sunshine and birds. it's gray and wet, but at the same time it makes you feel SO good, so fresh and alive, but in a quiet way. it's gray and green and the shy/shocking vulnerable pink of a cherry blossom, and wet.

you want to take long walks - not even in forests or anything, but just on the streets, looking at the skyscrapers, or on university campuses, through the eucalyptus groves and the oak-lined oak-roofed paths, with the redwood and the pines nearby.

there's something holy about a forest in the rain. then again, maybe it's just the february rain of san francisco that's holy. rain is the heart of this season, and this season is beautiful. autumn in new england; springtime in the bay. it's the same sort of magic.