With a nod to James Taylor, our long annual dry spell is finally over. It’s raining here in Socal, the first rain in six months. Hopefully this begins a four to six month pattern of cool days and sporadic rain, ending this year’s fire season.

Even after thirty years here it’s hard to get used to the compressed Socal seasons. There are only two seasons – a cool and mildly wet “winter” and a long, hot and dry “summer”. Spring and fall are conspicuously missing. I find that I like the winters here a lot and have come to hate the summers. Part of it is that I tolerate heat less and less in my dotage, making me wonder “why do older people move to Florida? Or Phoenix?”. The other part of it is that with summer comes the threat of Socal wildfires, a quite recent existential threat to those of us daring to live in areas with trees.

But I digress. With each first rain I feel a palpable sense of relief, a sense that everything is OK again. Six months without rain wears on me.

Postscript, 11/20: About 24 hours into our first “major” storm of the year we’ve gotten two tenths of an inch of rain. Color me unimpressed.

Postscript 2, 11/10: Ok, we got almost an inch of rain and some solid thunder and lightning this afternoon. I’m happy.

And just because I still love the song, here are JT’s immortal, poetic words from 1968 (!):