Pattern and Forecast (Vol. 2)

This is the second entry in a series in which writers give a report on the weather. Any meteorological statements made may range from the personal to the scientific, from observable weather to the felt. Read the first entry, by Andrew Durbin.

Sometimes the seasons get mixed up in Los Angeles. It’s autumn, but two days ago I felt a strong sense of late spring or early summer. Then it rained suddenly, briefly. I got out of the shower and saw that the leaves on a tree were wet and the sun was shining on the wet leaves. Then I saw the raindrops in the air.

This autumn I’ve been reading the diaries of Virgina Woolf, mostly before going to bed at night. I don’t often read writers’ diaries, but I like the entries. I like knowing what Woolf was thinking about her books as she wrote them, and their reception after they came out, and what she thinks of the other writers of her time. It is satisfying to be in her mind: “What is the right attitude towards criticism? What ought I to feel and say when Miss B. devotes an article in Scrutiny to attacking me? She is young, Cambridge, ardent. And she says I’m a very bad writer.”

Woolf didn’t write in her diary everyday, and many entries are left out, but they span much of her writing life, from 1918 to 1941, up until the month of her death. I’m not finished with the book, so I don’t know what those entries in 1941 will be like, and the years leading up to 1941. I am almost afraid to reach them, in the same way I was afraid, when reading my aunt Allison Miner’s journals, to read the entries close to her death, how sad I knew it would feel, and yet with my aunt it was important, a loving accompaniment.   

Two years ago my friend Jason tweeted of the seasons in L.A.:

•  The Flood
•  Pleasant
•  Copper Sun Cries Tears of Bone
•  Howling Desert Ghosts
•  Imaginary Flood

It’s raining again; real rain this time. I bend to pet my cats and then I hear the raindrops falling on the deck outside my window. Right now it should be Copper Sun Cries Tears of Bone; instead it’s Imaginary Flood.

I’ve never kept a diary. I’ve tried, but usually stop after two or three entries. Maybe imagined lives have been more interesting to write than my own. Yet my life comes into my fiction too. So this is an exercise at writing a small diary of my life in autumn weather. Once I am...