Nearly midnight here in Berkeley, and it’s still pushing 70 degrees. It’s windless, too–dead calm. I’m not preaching climate change this evening. The weather annals show that the week of the 1906 San Francisco Earthquake, which occurred April 18, was hot, too: highs in the 90s in San Jose and Santa Cruz, for instance–records that still stand. (No, I’m not suggesting this is “earthquake weather,” either).
But warm night-time weather is a relative rarity here. And with the stillness, the heat rising from the sidewalks, the little pockets of cool in the low spots where creeks used to run, the clear moonless sky and the smell of jasmine and other flowers filling the dark–it feels like a strange season.