12 Oct San Francisco: Interlude – A Weather Report
I’m not sure if I miss Autumn or not. I’m not even sure if San Francisco really has an autumn or is supposed to be having one right now. When I told my advisor I wanted to go to San Francisco State her immediate response was ‘you know it’s not sunny there all the time right? It rains for the most part’. As if the weather must be the only reason I wanted to come here or anywhere on the West Coast at all. While on campus or talking to strangers I share library tables with I constantly hear people complaining about the cold weather while I’m in a t-shirt and wishing I had something to tie my hair back with. Maybe I just don’t handle the heat well, but it’s been consistently warmer than most of British summer to me.
/>
I had a moment last week where I wished for Autumn, just for a little while, then I’ll happily go back to the beach again, a day or two of that shiver when you get out the shower and hot coffee to warm your hands, not just for the energy to get up the hill and home again. The next day gave me rain.
The weather in San Francisco matches it’s city well. You can wake up in Ingleside, up high by Ocean View, and watch the fog rolling in over the hills across from you, just as it had been outside your window the evening before, swaying in and enveloping your house in a little cloud all of its own after the pink sun had dipped into the ocean. Then you can walk down to Ocean Avenue, and melt in a coffee shop as the sun hones in directly on you while you try to do work and fan yourself intermittently, wishing you’d ordered something iced. Then catch the K line into Castro and find that it needs a weather report all of its own and you definitely needed to be wearing shorts by now. You can wander to Dolores Park in the early evening and find people giving up because it’s too cold already but you were in Berkeley all the rest afternoon and stored up enough heat to last hours while looking over the Bay bridges and hearing sports teams’ shouts and the marching band’s practice beats echoing across the hills. You put on your jacket fifteen minutes later.
San Francisco and the rest of the Bay has such character, such different characters, and so many scene stealers and fan favourites between and within them. It seems everything I write lately is a love letter to this city or those nearby, I wonder if that’ll stop? But as of now, in my mind and in the cities I conjointly inhabit, it was a beautiful day yesterday and it’ll be a beautiful day tomorrow, whether we get mist or sun or rain or anything like Autumn at all.
– Georgia Tomlinson-Spence
(@georgiarts)
/>
No Comments