Crisping Air

Just Excited for Fall

 

The other night just before I went to bed I heard the sharp screech of a barn owl in my neighborhood. I live near Lake Merritt which is heavily populated and the sounds of birdsongs are too quiet, too drowned out by cars, laughs, trucks backing up—the usual goings on of a day in any concrete place. But, just for one quiet moment as my neighborhood was going to bed, I heard the screech of the barn owl.

I don’t know why the barn owl was here in the city or where it fledged from. I do know that, this late into the summer, it must’ve survived its chaotic youth, seeing as barn owls are usually the most commonly found birds in clinics during the spring and summer. But, oddly, though I normally see them when the days are warm and bright and the nights are nice enough to stand outside very late to search for them in abandoned buildings and clock towers, at this moment, that harsh screech made me think that fall is around the corner.

Perhaps its their incessant sophomoric screeches, the ones I remember when I was in high school biking back from my first restaurant job to stare at the San Anselmo Town Center and watch them fly in and out of the bell tower, and how those screeches mixed with the lightly crisping air, were what reminded me of a coming California fall.

And yes there are things to fear in the transition between hot and cool weather here—the fires for one—but to think of everything in context of the future, every instant of the changing of the seasons will give yourself such a shock as to be completely burnt out by your own thoughts. You will be frozen, forgetting what beautiful moments remain and are worth attempting to maintain at all. You’ll forget how nice cool open air feels on your legs as you listen to juncos and titmice in oak trees in the distance. 

I could tell you something about climate change, or bad land management, or the fear and danger that our coming world brings to those of us living in the West. I could tell you that the past was beautiful and more quaint than the present, and certainly the future. But that does nothing, you already know this. 

However, what I would rather you do is stop reading for a second and look outside your window and think of what you see, right there in front of you. What does the air feel like on your skin? What is the light doing?

Riding my bike to the coffee shop where I’m writing right now, the air is crisp. There is a sweet bernedoodle who seems ready to leave and go run around some field for hours. A man is incessantly sighing and I’m a little unsure why. The shadows, at ten, are still so long. The leaves are not falling yet, only the air has that tinge of cold, which for me is fall. California fall has no major shifts, the hills don’t burst with color like New England. It’s a quieter kind of season change, but it’s here, and it’s beautiful, the portent of a quieter, less manically busy and social time. There really isn’t much more here for me to say. I just wanted to share how much I love the fall, despite the world.