Small things I notice

When you have lived somewhere long enough, the big landmarks fade into the background. What stays interesting are the small, repeated details of ordinary days. Here are some of mine, collected over the past few months.

The parrots

Some mornings a flock of wild green parrots flies over the house, shrieking as if they have urgent news. Nobody is entirely sure where they came from. Escaped pets, the usual story goes, many decades ago. They seem perfectly at home now, raiding fruit trees and arguing on telephone wires.

The sound of Saturday

If parrots are the morning alarm, leaf blowers are the weekend soundtrack. There is always one somewhere, droning away for what feels like hours. I have made my peace with it. It is part of the background noise, like distant helicopters and the occasional ice-cream van playing its song a little out of tune.

Dinner on the corner

Towards dusk, taco trucks and pop-up stands appear in car parks and on corners, string lights switched on, a small queue forming. Every neighbourhood has its favourites and its loyal regulars. Eating standing up on the pavement, with a paper plate in one hand and the sky going pink overhead, is one of the great pleasures of living here.

The palms will not last forever

The tall, skinny palms that line so many streets are not as eternal as they look. Many were planted long ago and are reaching the end of their lives, and the city has slowly started favouring shadier trees that suit the climate better. I'll miss them when they go. Nothing else makes a sunset look quite so much like a film set.

The weather conversation

People say there are no seasons here. There are, they are just subtle. There is the grey stretch in early summer, the hot dry winds in autumn when everyone gets a bit tense, the brief green weeks after winter rain when the hills look almost Irish. Small talk about the weather here is not boring. It is a careful comparison of microclimates.

"Is it hot where you are?" is a real question when your friend lives twenty miles inland.

Light

And finally, the light. I know every writer who has spent time here says it, and I'm sorry to repeat it, but it's true. In the last hour before sunset everything turns gold and then pink, stucco walls glow, and even a petrol station looks briefly beautiful. It is why I named this notebook what I did. It is the reason I still stop on the pavement, most evenings, just to look.