Rainless rainbows and giant prisms in the sky... that's what ended our Labor Day

Hunkered down inside all day (despite the holiday) because of the heat and humidity, Hubby and I finally decided it was cool enough to venture outside to take a short drive just before sunset. We wandered out to the car in the driveway and looked up. What we saw stunned us both.

Above us was a sky lit up like fire as the setting sun reflected off the unusual clouds. And in the midst of it all was a big rainbow coming down out of the middle of a cloud.

It hadn't rained. It wasn't going to rain. Yet there was a rainbow.

Our iPhones came out and we starting taking pictures thinking there was no way we could capture the intensity of the moment with little cameras in our cell phones.

We finally got in the car and headed out of our little hamlet and onto the big freeway that takes us up and out of our hilly terrain into the large valley that sits at the base of "our mountain" which hovers over the valley at 3,864 feet (1,178 m) in elevation. This is a drive we've made a thousand times. Our car always goes up and over the rise in the freeway until we reach the crest and suddenly the valley opens up in front of us with the majestic mountain rising in the distance (a camera never does this scene justice).

Yesterday evening the vista was even more magical than usual. To the right of "our mountain" was a giant shaft rainbow. I've never seen one before. It was like a huge prism hanging in the sky from the clouds overhead. The mist from the clouds was hanging in vertical bars and refracting the setting sun so perfectly that it was creating this beautiful phenomenon of nature--not a rainbow but a shaft prism.

I took out my iPhone again and started taking pictures as the car jiggled along the freeway toward "our mountain". I hoped and hoped that it would even capture a tenth of what we were seeing. It did capture that (and then some). Even though it couldn't capture all the bands of color our eyes were seeing, it caught enough to show the enormity of the miracle we were witnessing.

For those of you that experience summer rain and/or summer heat and humidity, you'll have to forgive our childlike excitement. These cloud formations aren't what we normally witness here in the hot, rainless summers of the San Francisco Bay Area. And we certainly don't experience them by the time September rolls around and we're completely starved for rain. Usually we still have a month or so to go until the autumn and winter rains come. So you can imagine our sheer childlike wonder and delight seeing rainless rainbows and giant prisms in the sky as the sun set on a September evening.

Autumn Reflections

Jodi at bloomingwriter has written a post for the first day of autumn that has caused me a great deal of reflection today. I like when someone else's writing does that for me. Thinking and reflection are good. Jodi wrote about the passing of summer with all its mixed emotions--sadness and regret being among them for her. Her perspective caused me to think about what my own perspective is about the passing of summer into autumn. I realized that Jodi's laments and mixed emotions about the passing of summer are the reasons why I need to live in this climate I live in.

As a child, I lived in the Rocky Mountains at a high elevation where we used to say we had three seasons--winter, July and August. It was very hard. There were years where we would get out of school for the summer, and then have snowfall the second week of June. Easter was often a white holiday. The growing season was very short. And the brief couple of months that were "summer" were so fleeting that it was very hard.

When I was 10, we moved back to the San Francisco Bay Area of California where I was born. We moved during the depths of February's coldness in Colorado to the sunny climate of a drought year in the Bay Area. I felt like I'd entered Eden. It was heavenly to see ice plant in bright bloom in people's front yards as I walked home from my first day of school on Valentine's Day. Flowers on Valentine's Day! Incredible!

Since that very memorable move when I was 10, I've lived in other places and other climates. But I never felt at home anywhere but here in the Bay Area. So I determined that I needed to stay here throughout my adulthood because I needed this climate. And that determination has been a good one and a real blessing.

The downside to our climate is that all the wonderful things that Jodi and many others out there in the northern hemisphere love about summer aren't part of my reality. I have to prepare myself every year that sometime around May all the major gardening work needs to end until autumn comes. With the fair freckled skin of a redhead, I cannot spend time in the direct summer sun for very long even with sunscreen. And our heatwaves are so extreme with Fahrenheit temps often-times hovering in the triple digits, that my garden maintenance chores need to be done well after 6 pm in the evening and sometimes even after sundown when the cooler breezes finally blow in off the waters of the San Francisco Bay. So my tomatoes and vegetables, my citrus trees, the spectacular curtains of bougainvillea blossoms, and my sub-tropical "Hawaii garden", have to be enjoyed in fits and spurts while I remain holed up in an air-conditioned house usually sitting in front of a computer trying to be creative for three months straight.

The other downside to our climate is that we rarely, if ever, get rainfall during summer. Our rainfall for the year occurs during the late fall, winter, and early spring. That's when the hills of the Bay Area turn a gorgeous shade of green. The green hills of January are a favorite sight for me. But during the summer, the hills are a golden yellow as the seasonal grasses and plants die because the rainfall has ended. This means that growing things in the garden during the summer and using water responsibly (always a concern even in a non-drought year) are always problematic. The majority of the beautiful blooms end in May and don't come back until the cooler days of autumn. So while everyone else in the northern hemisphere is enjoying an abundance of blooms in their July and August gardens, I am waiting (sometimes not-so-patiently) for September to come so I can enjoy color again instead of dried up leaves and pathetic looking roses.

So for all my blogging friends in other parts of the northern hemisphere, please excuse me over the next 9 months as a revel in gardening again after having been cooped up for 3 months. My summer is like your winter, and I've got a serious case of cabin-fever. I apologize in advance for my enthusiasm as I re-enter the world of swinging my sledgehammer at things and continuing where I left off in May. I promise that my exultant state is not intended to "rub it in" that we finally will have exciting new birds in the gardens--your birds. And if my posting ever becomes sporadic, you'll know why. It's because I'm finally able to go out and "play in the dirt" again because autumn has finally arrived!

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September Enters as a Fallen Butterfly Wing

Coming home from an errand as I approached the front door, I caught a glimpse of a bit of movement on the ground from a slight breeze that had blown across the front of the house. As I approached and bent over in investigation I found a solitary monarch butterfly wing shifting with every little breathe of air that moved across it's delicate silken surface.

I picked up the delicate and frail fragment of what had once been a thriving creature. The orange seemed dull from the lack of life as if without the flutter of the spirit the wing could not retain its vibrance. The monarch had fulfilled the measure of its creation. This was what remained.

September has come and soon much of the garden will shed its wings as well.

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