They have good taste. The most beautiful time around here, I tell everyone, is winter, between the great Pacific storms. The sun comes out and pale local residents stand still, wherever they are, chins raised to the sky, eyes ecstatically closed. The waves are awesomely beautiful, as long as you are not in a small boat or diving dinghy. Sea gulls gyre, or whatever it is they do, and little green shoots everywhere push out of the brown dirt.
Bulbs are up just in time to have their flowers knocked down by hailstorms.
Along country roads runoff trickles noisily down culverts and through corrugated drain pipes. Fresh rainwater squishes out of the meadows and forms pools wherever it's level. Frogs absolutely love this, and the ducks down by Caspar Pond are happy, too. At my house, I swear, we not only have frogs, we have frogs in trees. If it isn't a tree frog up there, making great croaking noises whenever I walk up to my front door, it's our local squirrel doing impersonations.