Jacaranda

It begins with one small blue blossom that has appeared as if from nowhere on the hood of your car in the parking lot.

You know this parking lot pretty well by now. It’s the one beside the park where two mornings a week you pull up, dazed and sleepy-eyed, for your far too early exercise class, the one where you will return to your car an hour later, aching and complaining but, irritatingly, also undeniably energized. At first you are puzzled by the blossom. Your car has been in your eye-line throughout the class, and you know that no one has walked past it, either carrying flowers or not; and while the squirrels have been known to scamper across the parked vehicles from time to time, carrying nuts and sometimes tree bark, and occasionally leaving a muddy paw print or two, their interest in flowers is minimal. Where on earth can this have come from? you wonder. At last you think to look up at the tree overhead. Then you remember.

The jacaranda tree, the glory of Los Angeles’ early summer, is easy to overlook for most of the year. It is neither big nor small, it sheds its leaves when the other deciduous trees do, and with its silvery branches bare, there is little to distinguish it from any other stripped tree on the city streets. But around about the middle of May, something begins to happen to the jacaranda tree that year after year will catch your heart with its beauty.

It starts when the blossoms are still sparse, causing nothing but a darkening of the tree’s branches, a thunderous, almost devilish shading of purple in the silver grey, as if an evil spirit has shaken the jacaranda into bruising and its bare branches are now reaching to the sky in outrage at the indignity. But gradually the blue begins to expand, and at last reveals itself, not as damage at all, but as the beginning of a crop of tiny and exquisite blue blossoms which will cover the branches before the leaves have sprouted and which in a week or so will have taken over the tree entirely, turning it from simply a tree into something almost ridiculously exquisite, an unbroken mass of pure violet suspended in the air, like the carefully crafted crayon scribbles you see in sophisticated fashion ads. Whole streets of Los Angeles are lined with jacaranda trees, and when they are in blossom those usually unremarkable city streets are transformed into purple tunnels of unearthly delight.

Your husband might be a practical sort, a native Angeleno, who might not be a fan of the jacaranda tree in the spring. He might flatly refuse to park his car beneath any one of them, growling darkly about sticky falling blossoms and insect secretions and erosion of the paint job. He might refer to them as the Purple Peril, and threaten to write a murder mystery in which the killer – a non-native who does not know to check – will be unmasked by the jacaranda deposit from the scene of the crime lying puddled and damningly violaceous on the roof of his car. But then, your husband is a practical sort. You, on the other hand, feel every year around this time as if you are a child in a story book, walking through an enchanted forest of giant bluebells.

The full glory of the jacaranda is as short-lived as it is astonishing: the flower show lasts for maybe two weeks before the leaves start to appear too, breaking up the purple clouds, and turning the sorcerer’s showpiece into simply an unusually pretty tree with purple blossoms. By the time the leaves have taken over and most of the blossoms fallen, the summer has started – the long and lazy, Beach Boys’ Southern Californian summer, when the sky is deep blue and the light is blazing white and the shadows are as sharp as razors, when butterscotch-skinned kids with salt-tangled hair ride their skateboards to the beach, and leggy California girls sashay along the sidewalk in teeny-tiny frayed denim cut-off shorts baring their teeny-tiny tanned waists to the sun, and stately matrons with their skin sensibly covered protect their heads with morose, dark-colored nylon umbrellas, and year after year you wonder why some enterprising soul doesn’t think to start a business selling them prettily patterned parasols but somehow no one ever does, and the farmers markets are bursting with peaches and plums and cherries, and there are butter-slathered corn ears to crunch and juices of plump tomatoes forever running down your chin, and because it’s too hot to light the oven you live on barbecues and salads and Thai deliveries, when cats and dogs flop exhaustedly in the shade, and your skin tingles with sunburn in the evening, and even if you haven’t been to the beach you can still feel the salt in your hair and the sand in your toes, because right now the beach is the only place that feels bearable to think about in all this heat.

The heat – oh, the Southern California summer heat. The season begins grudgingly, with glumly overcast skies in late May and early June – it happens year after year, and so reliably that there’s even a name for it, June gloom, and just as reliably, year after year, Angelenos are both surprised and puzzled by this – but then the sun begins to show, and this isn’t too bad you say hopefully to each other, if it stays like this it’ll be OK. But it never does stay like that. It creeps, slowly but relentlessly, from mild in May to balmy in June, from balmy to hot in July, from hot to sizzling in August, and to your horrified indignation will stay that way and worse, clear through September and sometimes into October, when morning after morning by all laws of decency there should surely be a nip in the air by now, but morning after morning there isn’t, until each day when you wake up to yet more azure skies and yet another fat beaming sun you want to dive back under the covers and beg for mercy, until at last the season turns, the mists begin to creep in from the Ocean and you scrabble in your closet for your soft and cozy sweaters, and begin to think of stocking up on Hallowe’en candy, and sigh just a little because the lovely salt-kissed summer is over for another year.

All of this is to come. But for right now, it’s just a small, blue, bell-shaped blossom that has drifted from nowhere onto the hood of your car in the parking lot.