The grasses know…
… what time it is.
It is 6:44 PM now, as I write this blog. It is pitch black outside. Yes, early this morning we did a “fall back” to standard time from daylight savings time. Daylight savings time was a brilliant concept devised by a very brilliant man, Benjamin Franklin, in 1784.
When I lived in the Midwest, late fall was perhaps my least favorite time of year, with daylight hours rapidly diminishing. In Wisconsin, Novembers were often “gray,” between the spectacular colors of changing leaves and the wonderful whites and icy jewelry of winters. I loved the early springs, and still do, when life seems most vigorous, bursting forth in so many ways.
California has “cured” my doldrums of the fall.
Somehow, no matter how you water your lawn (and God knows my neighbors have tried), 
the grasses themselves know when it is fall and time to grow. Their biological clocks are not fooled by the artificial watering. Their biologies know the difference between rainwater with the nitrogenous compounds picked up from the air on the way down and drinking water pumped from the water lines of cities.
So now, as I watch the daylight hours grow shorter, I watch a new greenery in the meadows and the hills, as rainwater returns to my part of California. Even though the grasses know what time it is, many of the stupid flowers do not! One of the observations that “threw” me when I first moved to California, is that of leaves turning brilliant colors on deciduous trees, and simultaneously, new flowers blooming! It is a difference from the Midwest that I have come to appreciate and love.
So now I count the hours until the Winter Solstice, after which days start to grow longer again. But instead of the gray that I experienced in Wisconsin and to a lesser degree in Ohio, I have freshly blooming flowers as brilliantly colored leaves fall off the trees.
And on the hillsides, I have grasses growing with that characteristic light green of new growth…
Because the grasses know what time it is….
-Bill at
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