On foliage events in this peculiar place.
I got to walk around Palo Alto for a bit Thursday, and I discovered
yet another fascinating foliage event. There have been a number
of these since I woke up one day a year and a half ago and realized
I lived in California, in the south bay, no less. So I'll describe
some.

I was walking through downtown Mountain View in the first week
of February of 2001. At that time, perpetual autumn was alternating with
rain, as it is now, in December of 2001. But something was different,
and I stopped dead when I realized what it was. The trees were budding.
Not just one tree, but all of them. I wanted to explain to them
what foolishness this was! "You, trees, what are you doing? Don't
you know it's barely February?" But no, they went ahead
and budded and bloomed, ignoring my contentions, and they seemed
to do just fine.

I used to go to work by riding by bike over a freeway to get to a
light rail station, studying Mandarin on the train to work, and
later riding home. The freeway has a wall on one side, and the
wall was covered with ivy. One day around springtime, I was cruising
up that way and half of the freeway wall had burst into a bloom of
yellow. Astonishing. The following week, the other half followed
suit in a different shade. What I had taken for ivy was in reality
two different creeping plants that bloom at slightly different
times. What a marvel, that people bother to landscape a freeway
with blooming plants.

Given that it almost never freezes here, the fact that deciduous
trees cheerfully turn colors and drop their leaves every winter
seems almost vestigial, or perhaps is another of those customs that
continue beyond their original environment, such as North Americans
celebrating Christmas with holly and mistletoe. However, it seems
that the fact that the trees have no imperative to drop their leaves
appears to mean that each species of tree can decide to drop at its own
particular time.

The third phase was the one I noticed on Thursday, the astonishingly
red leaves dropped by the trees in Palo Alto. The ones on the
ground are the richest red I've ever seen a leaf display (and I am
from maple country), whereas the ones on the trees themselves are
green and yellow. I wonder if the leaves turn red after they fall,
or if they fall right after turning red. But it was a red one could
fall into if one stared too hard.

And now that most of the leaves have fallen, the sea urchin trees
are left naked with just their spiny little bulbs still hanging.
I think of them as self-decorating Christmas trees, although the
bulbs aren't quite as shiny and friendly when they are covered with
spikes.