Posting about the weather
Jun. 16th, 2007 10:02 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
gordonzolaI'm not a native Californian. My parents moved to the Bay Area in 1970 from the Midwest, though Michigan was only a stopover for them on the way west from New Jersey.
When we moved to California, they stopped going to church. How can you spend a weekend day in church when all the natural beauty of the Bay Area is there to be explored for the first time? We probably hit every beach in Marin and Sonoma counties those first few years. Still, this wasn't exactly the California my parents expected. Bay Area beaches are almost always windy and cold. Perfectly planned picnics were abandoned due to wind-cause earaches and too much sand in sandwiches. To this day when I think of eating on the beach, I think gritty frustration and hurting teeth.
We lived on the other side of a mountain from the coast. While that placement caused our neighborhood to have the most rain in our county, the fog generally burned off early. At 6 AM it may be thick enough that you couldn't see the next house, but by leaving-for-school time it would usually be sunny and getting hot.
The first time I realized I was different from other kids was that I always cheered against the sun. Every summer morning fog made me think that, maybe today, it would be overcast, cloudy, not so hot. I got my hopes up every day and then got disappointed.
I'm the only real Californian in the family. My parents were still East Coasters at heart and my brother and sister had their formative years in a Detroit suburb. I was the only one who knew I could take the sun for granted. My parents operated on the scarcity values of their youths though so when it was sunny, you couldn't waste the day. I was an active kid. I played sports in every season. But I've also always been a reader. Many a summer day was spent trying to find a place to hide from my parents so I could finish a book.
Some folks think it's odd that San Franciscans complain about the heat fairly easily, but to me this town is a refuge. SF is at least ten degrees cooler every day than my hometown 15 miles away. I love the fog. Today, after two hot days, it's back. San Francisco is cold again. Just the way I like it.
When we moved to California, they stopped going to church. How can you spend a weekend day in church when all the natural beauty of the Bay Area is there to be explored for the first time? We probably hit every beach in Marin and Sonoma counties those first few years. Still, this wasn't exactly the California my parents expected. Bay Area beaches are almost always windy and cold. Perfectly planned picnics were abandoned due to wind-cause earaches and too much sand in sandwiches. To this day when I think of eating on the beach, I think gritty frustration and hurting teeth.
We lived on the other side of a mountain from the coast. While that placement caused our neighborhood to have the most rain in our county, the fog generally burned off early. At 6 AM it may be thick enough that you couldn't see the next house, but by leaving-for-school time it would usually be sunny and getting hot.
The first time I realized I was different from other kids was that I always cheered against the sun. Every summer morning fog made me think that, maybe today, it would be overcast, cloudy, not so hot. I got my hopes up every day and then got disappointed.
I'm the only real Californian in the family. My parents were still East Coasters at heart and my brother and sister had their formative years in a Detroit suburb. I was the only one who knew I could take the sun for granted. My parents operated on the scarcity values of their youths though so when it was sunny, you couldn't waste the day. I was an active kid. I played sports in every season. But I've also always been a reader. Many a summer day was spent trying to find a place to hide from my parents so I could finish a book.
Some folks think it's odd that San Franciscans complain about the heat fairly easily, but to me this town is a refuge. SF is at least ten degrees cooler every day than my hometown 15 miles away. I love the fog. Today, after two hot days, it's back. San Francisco is cold again. Just the way I like it.
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no subject
Date: 2007-06-16 05:42 pm (UTC)