"A Princely Season" - Commentary by Tony Seton

A Princely Season

If I’d been in charge of designing the seasons, I probably would have skipped summer and winter and just extended spring and fall, though on the Northern California coast, truth be told, summer and winter are hardly brutal. Here in Redding, the cool autumn nights descend ever earlier, with only a few weeks before we stop saving daylight. This evening, clouds shied in from the west, appearing sort of ominous, but in fact they were just sky-dressing. It’s not time to rain yet.

Back at the beginning of August we had .68 inches of rain, and that’s been it. For a time you could have teased some folks by saying we’d had 20 times more rain than usual, and you would have been right, but irrelevant. Viz, Mark Twain who said something to the effect of, Statistics are like ladies of the evening; once you get ‘em down you can do anything you want with ‘em.

Fall is a time of retrenching, and of death. Buster is in his fall, having circuited around the sun 14 times now, probably. He doesn’t hear well, except at doggie pitch levels, and it’s hard to understand his vision. He has to turn his head back and forth to catch a new arrival in the room, but if a piece of food is tossed in his direction, he snaps it out of the air cleanly, usually. I should note that though he seems confused about what’s happening to him, he smiles most of the time and wags his tail a lot, vigorously.

It’s cool in the mornings now, sometimes below 50. That may not sound cool to many parts of the country, but considering that only a couple of months ago, it was already 80 at eight in the morning, it’s cool. Particularly because we are on the south wall of a canyon, and Ole Sol takes his time climbing the ridge to cast his warmth across our dell. Still, by the middle of the afternoon, I’m back in shorts and a t-shirt, though not for long as the sun sets over a west canyon wall only a few hours later.

The hills and the gardens are showing a lot of brown, while some of the maples have begun their Crayola flashdance. The oaks won’t shed until much later, and the digger pines stay ever green. Soon the clouds will gather darkly and threaten, and it will mean something. The long-parched earth and rasping roots will be sated, then inundated, if all goes according to plan. Who’s ever plan.

And that’s SetonnoteS...I’m Tony Seton.