June Gloom

Posted on June 6, 2005 in Weather

The mist painted over the hills where my residential development could easily have been denied by a slacker who had only my description of it to go by. The rain that fell between the slabs of Spanish-tiled condos with Federal Style windows was so light that with a hot sun tomorrow a know-it-all could declare that it never happened.

My telling you this could be a conspiracy or an illusion. I could be calling the sunlight “fog” and its heat “rain”. The hill our development is built upon could be a deep pit. Entrapment is everywhere. I could be a liar or, worse, I could be a nice fellow who is in denial or, worse, a dupe of the drug companies.

Yet there was a fog and there was a rain. The temperature dropped and it felt like March or a warm day in February. You can’t see it any more than you can feel the pain if I slam my hand in a door. You have to take me on faith.

I loved the cold prickle of the wet breeze on my temples and my face, the darkening of the streets, the deepening of the shade.

A friend called it “June Gloom. The fog rises up from the sea and leans heavily on the mountains. Before the scorch of July, August, and September, we enjoy these weeks of comfort under an umbrella made entirely of water. My friend did not think it gloomy. She rested before the whippings delivered by the sun. When July arrived, she goes into hiding. Summer, as I have written elsewhere, is the season when everything dies in Southern California except for a few hardy evergreens and the live oaks. Residents either flee the coastal plain for the mountains or enclose themselves in air conditioned boxes.

It would be impossible to weather the summer without air conditioning. The days might be bearable, but the nights impossible. Speaking for myself, there is no comfortable sleeping when the condo has been heated by air rising out of the ground. The roasted atmosphere can’t be seen, but those who exist in it don’t deny its power to distract the resting body by boiling the liquids cupped inside its cells.

June Gloom prevents this from happening. It kisses the body with its coolness. It is real and comforting. Damn the rhyme. Gloom is not what it is all about.