Seasonal

What is so rare as a day in June...except a Northern Californian day in December, in between bursts of rain and gusts of wind, everything washed and blown clear?  Backed up with a reminder that there is such a thing as cold.  Such days, short on hours, long on promise.  A drive over the coastal hills reveals everything.  That despite the commercial hoopla, there really is good reason to celebrate the year's sharpening to a point, narrowing to its solstice.  The sun cannot drift much farther south.  The sideways light cannot illuminate things more brightly and starkly.  The Lake District may be 6000 miles away, but damned if the Crystal Springs Reservoirs, viewed from close to surface level as Highway 90 zips eastward on its short causeway, doesn't look a lot like Ullswater.  No, not as craggy as Cumbria, certainly not as cold, and probably a total illusion, except for the winter light.  Which even in California's northern half has a way of transforming things.

And things could use a little transforming.  Today, in the blue smogless sky storm clouds march and billow in uncertain purpose.  The weather forecast, always questionable, insists the region is in for a major storm.  All signs point to the contrary.  The clouds are scattering, not gathering, and sunlight is both bright and abundant.  Still, there's been a change in the weather.  There have been some changes made, as the song says.  Just look at the slopes of the short canyon the drops from the coastal range toward the plain at Half Moon Bay.  In brown and faint chartreuse, the chaparral swoops and curves seaward, tight as a carpet pile, resembling this time of year, gorse or some other northern ground-hugger.

And why does any of this matter?  It does, it does terribly.  For if one can be, like it or not, sucked into the seasonal holiday maw, surely the natural cycle is much more powerful and rich.  Because, okay, having returned from Seattle, scene of last year's beginning of the last act for Marlou and me, and having gotten caught up in reminders of unfortunate events there...I know there is more to come.  

What would be next is Hawaii.  Marlou and I went there every Christmas on a family visit.  So odd and unexpected, fighting one's way to San Francisco Airport on a chilly December day, then stepping off into the balmy, sauna-like airport in Honolulu...then a quick drive to Marlou's parents home on the north side of the island.  Where imagination always reigned, for it takes a certain flair and even whimsy to transform a tropical beach paradise into anything Christmasy.  But Marlou's mother has always been up to the task.  A Polynesian bust with a Santa's cap.  Lights strung around portraits of Hawaiians.  And damned if it didn't work.  And in fact, it worked so well, that I can't bear to be there this year.  I'm glad that one of the grandsons is visiting this Christmas.

Naturally, I'm heading for Gloucestershire, where nothing separates the winds from the North Pole except imagination.  'Bracing' is the word my cousin Caroline applies to the howling gale.  Never mind.  'tis the season.  And the seasons were here first.  They beat out Thanksgiving by several billion years.  They do not mark life in the way of calendars, being too energetic and mercurial.  They generate life, it seems.  Out of nothing.  They make happen what doesn't want to happen.  They even make perfectly sane people drive across the coastal hills and up Highway 1 to the Half Moon Bay Airport, home of the 000 Café.

It's a strange place, one end of the building shared by the small airport office, closed and shuttered on the day I was there.  The restaurant interior is decorated with propellers, airplane models and posters.  The runway is just outside the café window, on full display, and devoid of activity.  In the 90 minutes I was there, not a single plane came and went.  Not to worry, because the 000 Café serves truly homemade potatoes along with authentic coastal crab cakes and an artery-stopping hollandaise sauce that could ground many a pilot.  Cappuccino?  The proprietor insists that he now uses his espresso machine as a boat anchor, demand for the brew being low, and the waves on Half Moon Bay being high.  The men's toilet has an electronic door opener for the disabled.  I give the café my highest rating, AAAA+.

On the way home, there's no sign of rain.  But the breeze is still breezy, the sun sunny.  Halloween pumpkins, of which Half Moon Bay makes much with an annual festival, sit naked in a field.  I hope they will get frozen or canned, for there are so many of them, and it's a long time until the next Halloween.  Not that I care about holidays, remember, having decided that seasons have so much more ur about them.

Which is all bluster, of course.  There's no avoiding the seasonal sentiment.  One can turn off the mercantile messages entirely, and still it filters through.  Merry jingle.  But there's no stopping the sky.  Which is the antidote to everything December-ish.  It blows and, even more powerfully, it draws, sucking you up the Pacific Coast to an empty airport, making you eat crab cakes, keeping the season bright.