The Ups and Downs of Matchlessness

“O matchless earth — we underrate the chance to dwell in thee!”
— Emily Dickinson

(a little love song)

Having grown up in northern California, that wondrous place of dry and temperate climate, I am finding it hard to adjust to the hot and sticky summer of the South. Mind you, I left California in 1965.

You might think that the ensuing 46 years would afford plenty of time in which to recalibrate my responses to extremes of temperature and humidity. I’m not usually so stubborn about things, but in this instance, I’ve never gotten a handle on my petulant inner child: She still insists on whining that it’s too hot, too moist, too oppressive do anything but complain.

Air conditioning is a wonderful thing and I’m grateful to the mind of man for inventing it, but I hate being house-bound all summer long, just to stay cool. There’s also the problem of brown-outs when too many hot people crank up their a/c, putting the electrical grid on overload. And given summer’s frequent thunderstorm activity in this part of the world, complete power outages are inevitable and fairly frequent.

When I was a kid living on the San Francisco Peninsula, we would hear an occasional, faint and far-off rumble from behind the mountains to the east. My mother would say: “You hear that? It’s thundering over in the Valley. But don’t worry; it never thunders here.” And she would tell us how frightened she was by her first thunderstorm. She had gone east to college, and during that nighttime storm, not only did the power go out, but a bolt of lightning hit a big tree just outside her dormitory window, shattering it on the spot. I hate to admit it, but her scaredy-cat gene lives on in me. I used to put on a brave front for my children, but they’re grown and gone, and these days I just flinch and squeak and don’t even pretend to be unaffected by the flash-and-boom weather.

When I was about 10, a family from back east moved into our neighborhood. They had a daughter my age who loved to complain that our beautiful live oak trees didn’t have big vines growing on them like the trees in the woods behind their house in Virginia. She said the vines were large enough for her to swing on like Tarzan: you just needed to check first to be sure they weren’t poison ivy vines. I, who was altogether too familiar with the misery occasioned by encounters with California’s virulent poison oak, shuddered to think of an actual vine of poison anything. Now that I’ve encountered real poison ivy, I have developed great respect for its unpleasant qualities, but I promise you that it can’t compare to the horror that is poison oak.

The same friend was sure that we were about to fall into the Pacific during an earthquake. I pointed out that there was a good ten mile stretch of mountains between us and the ocean, and although the San Andreas Fault ran about a mile from our house, it was down in the valley, and we lived on a high, rocky hill. No matter, she told me: somehow the ocean would well up and pour down over the mountains like a giant tidal wave. Or even if that didn’t happen, we were in danger of falling into the huge crack she envisioned running right through our hill when the next quake hit. Fortunately, she and her family moved back to Virginia after a year or two, and I breathed a lot easier.

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The Ups and Downs of Matchlessness

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