Grey

Cheerful, no?

Here in the Central Valley of California, it's not unusual to have a sky this color from November to about March, from dawn until dusk.  It's a grey bowl that hangs over the entire valley, covering it in a thick blanket that doesn't go away. Get enough days of it in a row, and you will slowly begin to lose your mind, longing for visible sunrises, sunsets, or even an actual storm ... anything, other than slate grey low clouds that never lift or change.


I'm not at the point of madness yet; we've had a fair amount of sunny days but today was a classic winter day for this area.  But I can't honestly say I'm OK with it.  We were actually going to take pictures of the house today for the real estate listing and both my agent and I decided this was not a good day to take an inviting picture.  The sun was almost out this morning (a temporary, freak occurrence), but it was a watery, anemic-looking sunshine which did nothing to enhance whatever it shone on.  Blech.


Here is my greatest problem with The Valley... it's like this a lot in winter, forcing you, out of sheer tedium if nothing else, to seek a different kind of weather -- at the coast or the mountains.  In the summer, it's hot every day and night, from May through October, and so you again flee for the coast or mountains, seeking some relief from the 24/7 heat.


I won't even talk about the bad air that builds up when clouds like this hang around, never letting any pollutants out.  It's worse in summer, when a clear bowl of inversion layer does the same thing. And we have the asthma rates to prove it.  


So all that being said, the bragging rights to this area center mainly around the fact that it has such good proximity to places of beauty, like those I just spoke of -- the lovely Central California coastline (2 hours away) or the snow-capped Sierras (also about 2 hours away). Yet, I've come to believe that living in proximity to a beautiful place without ever being able to pick up your mail and have your morning coffee there may not be hell, but it has got to be a kind of purgatory.  You can visit paradise on a day pass, but you must always pack up and go back home to your purgatorial haze or fog at some point.


Luckily, no one spends their eternity in purgatory.  According to the faith tradition which believes in purgatory, it's the temporary place you reside in before moving on to heaven.  And so, we pray, it will be the same for us here, those whose current address of residence is under the Grey Bowl of Winter.