I’ve been in denial.

For a couple weeks i’ve noticed the gradual shift in temperature and smell that can only mean one thing.

Summer is over, fall is here.  When I was a school kid in Southern California, I loved the end of Summer.  I liked school, and pumpkins, and hoodies.  I liked when the night came earlier, and we’d get occasional cold rain to soak my converse through and through and dye my socks grey.

But for the past few years i’ve been living an endless summer kind of life.  Chasing the heat, the warm water.  The rain I felt was not the cold rain of autumn, but the heavy, humid rain of a monsoon.  When rainy season would come and pound on the aluminum roof and wake me from fitful, sweaty sleep.  So loud i’d wonder if the boat would go out that day.  So loud I’d wonder if the streets were flooding, and if it would ever end, or maybe the sea would rise and swallow our whole island.  That loud.

But today, I am in Southern California, and summer is over.  Maybe this is growing up, cycling through the seasons and taking a taste of what each has to offer.  The sweet olive is blooming outside my parents’ house, and there is a crispness to the air that only a native southern california girl can sense.   Today I wore a hoodie.

There is something beautiful in so cal autumn.  Pumpkin spice muffins, turning the heater on, warm blankets.   The visibility in the water goes on for days, and there is a calm before the winter.

That, and I’ve switched from white wine back to red.  It’s been a few years, old friend, but it’s Autumn in Southern California for a Merbabe again.

xxmerbabe diving with seals today.