One of my favorite songs to sing just to sing is Kate Wolf’s ‘Here in California.’ It’s a gorgeous, oft-covered song about love and trust in which Wolf vividly renders both those large topics and the equally variable California landscape.
Here in California, fruit hangs heavy on the vines
And there's no gold, I thought I'd warn you
And the hills turn brown in the summertime
I was born in Watsonville and raised in Santa Cruz County and when I get to that last line of the chorus I feel those brown, late-summer days in my bones. Even when here in California has most recently been the flip side of that song.
Here and now in California, the rain is falling hard and the ground is soaked and the hills are unstable. Here in Alameda, the water table is high and I'm dressing in rain pants and long underwear and reading about my hometown and teenage haunts in the national news. Here in California, I’m remembering the calamitous storms of the early 1980s, and what it was like to wake up and learn that 25 miles away, thirty homes had been swallowed up by a mudslide while their inhabitants were asleep.
Here in California has always been about living with extremes, and the older I get, the more fragile it all seems… and is. Then I take a walk on the beach after a soggy day of monitoring the sump pump, scratching my head about where the wet & dry vacuum might be while wondering how long this little island will stay intact and whether its folly to live here.. and I’m in the postcard scene pictured above. And I’m in love with this place, this state, all over again…and able to avoid, for the moment, answering my own questions.
Kate Wolf, of course, was onto all of this:
It's an old familiar story
An old familiar rhyme
To everything, there is a season
To every purpose, there's a time
A time to love and come together
A time when love longs for an end
A time for questions we can't answer
But we ask them just the same