When I arrived in Southern California from Vermont more than a quarter of a century ago, I made the rookie mistake of thinking Los Angeles was a seasonless city, an endless summer and a perpetual day at the beach.
After all, Vermont does its seasonal transitions, especially the summer-to-fall one, like nobody's business. Autumn in the Northeast cannot be ignored. It arrives with all the subtlety of Carrot Top on a fire engine, the trees covering the hills of the Green Mountain State, exploding into a riot of blazing oranges, flaming crimsons and sunny yellows like a last, dramatic bid for attention before ceding the seasonal stage to Old Man Winter.
Over the years, I've learned to appreciate the more modest shifts that mark SoCal seasons (May gray, June gloom, the El Niño winds), but part of me always yearned for the showy cacophony of color, the festive foliar flare that takes summer out with a bang. A few years ago, I realized there were color-coded harbingers that fall had arrived right under my nose (and I'm not referring to astronomical fall — Sept. 22 — which is based on the autumnal equinox, but the feeling that the seasonal page has turned). They were just, like the seasons here themselves, a lot more muted. Below are a few of the colors that, to this former Vermonter, signal that L.A.'s version of autumn is well under way.
