Fire Season

Phoenix by Katsushika Hokusai

I hate it when I hear people from other parts of the US saying that we don’t have seasons in Northern California just because we don’t have the seasons that they are expecting, the same rigidly defined four seasons—spring, summer, autumn, winter—that they have grown up with, because they are so preoccupied with looking for what they think we should have here, that they miss the seasons that we actually do have, like our year begins with a beautiful season of dry golden hills turning green from the previous two months of short, cold, days and drenching rains, with wildflowers blooming in glorious orange, purple, yellow, and blue, and with creeks rushing down the hillsides, tumbling and splashing over cataracts, which is then interrupted by a brief, two-week season of hot-and-sunny-enough-to-go-swimming in the middle of winter, followed by another season of cool days and drenching rain but this one scented with garden flowers—daphne, freesia, and pink jasmine—until at last the rains are over and there is a sunny season of blue skies filled with puffy white clouds and roses blooming like mad in the old lady’s front yard down the street, then a season where it gets chilly again, with cool, foggy mornings that may or may not turn into into clear, warm afternoons, then a warmer season of tomatoes ripening in the warm sun and forgotten zucchini that has grown so big it is no longer any good for eating, and finally the season we’re having now, fire season, when the leaves of the Sycamore trees turn a crisp, dull red and a golden light endows everything with a new intensity of color, as if, after the soft pastels of the previous months, we had to be reminded of what colors really are, and when the wind blows in hot and dry from the valley to the east instead of cool and damp from the Pacific ocean to the west, bringing with it “summer” days that are more like summer than actual summer ever was, along with a sense anxiety as we wait for the inevitable news of a fire breaking out somewhere because while fire doesn’t always burn where we want it to, it is an essential part of nature’s cycle of destruction and renewal, and that is why I am choosing this season—fire season—to come out with my new name and my new pronouns, so the hot dry winds blowing in from the birthplace of the world, the solitary mountain directly east of here that the original people called Tuyshtak, can burn away my dead name and the person I was always just pretending to be, and when the new year comes along I’ll be ready for it.