I remember from the last time we lived in the San Francisco Bay area that there are two seasons here: winter, when most of the rain falls, and summer when very little or no rain falls. I feel that the terms “winter” and “summer” are misleading, though: “winter” comes from Old English, and the season it describes has little or no resemblance to winters in old England. I tend to think of the two seasons here as the green season — because when the rain falls, the plants start to grow, and the hills turn green — and the brown season — because after the rains stop, eventually the plants dry out, and the hills turn golden brown.

We are in the middle of the brown season now: the hills are brown, the soil is dry, the air feels dry. I was walking through a residential neighborhood a couple of days ago, and some of the home owners let their front yards turn brown: either they let their lawns dry up and turn brown, or they had something other than grass growing, or they just had bare ground or pea stone for their yards. But the majority of home owners feel the need to have bright green lawns year round. As I walked through this residential neighborhood, I couldn’t help thinking how odd it looked to have lush green lawns during the brown season. It would be as if New England home owners had snow-making machines, and tried to cover their front lawns with snow during the hottest days of August.