Peninsula

It doesn't snow here in winter. We lace palm trees with lights, white, or many colors. The night sea breeze bites some, forty degrees, and if it dips a little lower we have frost warnings. Bring in your pets, cover plants. Snow, if it comes, melts before it ever touches the grass. One pacific northwesterner uncle wears shorts during a December visit. The rest of us are bundled, probably overbundled. Some of us dream of getting away from this place, the sun, the lightning. Musty air you break a sweat in walking the length of a parking lot. But we don't know yet about snow. If it snowed tomorrow some of us would die, unprepared, idealistic. A mirage in the heat. A mirage in the snow. Maybe that's why northerners come to get out of the hard grey, though you couldn't call it an oasis. Not if you lived here full time. There is a lot of fucking water, though. You have to give it that.