Here in Southern California, it’s jacaranda, or apparently more accurately jacaranda mimosifolia, time.
A gentle veil of soft, deep purple has settled all up and down the residential streets. In the morning, you find your car covered in a thin shroud of purple. It laughs purple, weeps purple, wakes and sleeps purple.
Back in the early ’90s, I worked for three years at a law office on the corner of Wilshire and Doheny in Beverly Hills. My principal emotion during those years was despair. One spring day I was in my boss’s sixth floor office and as he nattered on about the motion for relief from default I was to write one more time because, one more time, he’d ignored a deadline, I glanced out his windows and saw that all the streets north of Wilshire were blanketed in purple. It was jacaranda time! There was poetry, beyond the prison walls there was life! It was perhaps the one truly happy moment of my career as an attorney.
Looking back, that may have been the first moment I knew I had to leave.
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