What a cool,mellow morning! The curtain of fog is shrouding everything beautiful and ugly, as though to embrace it all. As you step outside, the cool touches the depths of your soul, calming all the storms, big or small, in your consciousness, leaving you to paecefully sigh,"This is heavenly". The pearls of dew glisten on the heat exhausted leaves, infusing fresh breath and hope in to them. They know their days are numbered, so they drink from this nectar like a terminal patient getting hydration, drop by drop. Even though we do not get the four typical seasons in Southern California, we will get our "Fall". These leaves will make room for new ones to come, true to the cycle of life. The difference is that we won't get many Fall colors, exccept where some of us have planted trees that actually change color. Effect is not the riot of color you see in some other states, but that of a dull green landscape with blobs of color. Our pines are always green,and the landscape is not totally bare. We do not grieve the fallin of leaves like Tennyson:
My heart faints and my whole soul grieves
At the moist rich smell of rotting leaves"
Yet the melancholy of the season will hit a little later, when the day will turn in to night rather quickly, and the dark evenings will drag like the never ending stories of a tired, old relative.

Our leaves do not get the chance to rot and mulch.When the leaves dry here, Santa Ana winds blow them all around, and then the rains wash them away.The Santa Anas are no calming breezes that bring wifts of ripening fruits or brewing apple ciders.These blow in hot and fierce like demons. Nothing stands in their way. Half the ripening fruits meet an untimely end,and the flowering plants lose their crowning glories. Anything that is not tied down, will be found in the most unlikeliest of places. No need to despair yet. We do have a bit of time to enjoy the cool mornings and balmy afternoons till these nightmares hit. Right now it is a:

Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness!
Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun;
Conspiring with him how to load and bless
With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eaves run;
To bend with apples the mossed cottage-trees,
And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core;

We are revelling in Keats' Autumn, with apples ripening, big red figs bending the boughs, and grapes a-plenty.