Autumn in LA

"Autumn in LA,
it can be so exciting.
Autumn in LA
it can be so inviting..."

Actually, the original lyrics for "Autumn in New York" are much better, conveying the pleasant cool, crispy bright days that only an East Coast Autumn can produce.

Not so in LA. This, pictured above, is our fall. You in other places get flaming leaves of scarlet and gold. We just get flames.
You all in civilized climes get brilliant days of inviting cool.
We get overcast with chance of ash.
You get the smell of leaves and harvest.
We get the stentch of arcid smoke and destruction.

In other parts of the country, fall marks the beginning of the end of the year.

Here, fall often resembles what the beginning of the end of the world is supposed to look like.

Seriously, the way the sky looks much of the time with a blood red sun and the smell of scorched earth, one would not be at all surprised to see the "sky rolling back as a scroll" together with the bodies of those who have died in Christ popping up like popcorn from the local cemetery and flying off to meet him who is surely coming in the clouds at any minute.

It'd look just just like one of those pictures of the rapture that the 7th Day Adventists used to protray so well in their bible books for children. My dear 7th Day Adventist Grandma exposed to me to this notion of apocalytic terror back when I was growing up Methodist. The Methodists did not preach on this and so the thought of all hell busting loose like that was news to me.

And now I'm living in one of those pictures. Lord have mercy!