Some poetically grieve for the last rose of summer, but I say bring on the Naked Ladies.

I first started noticing the flashy pink lily, technically a type of Amaryllis known as the Belladonna lily, on a hike down the Mendocino and Sonoma coasts. Some women hikers suddenly whooped and ran into a field to each emerge with a single bubblegum-colored bloom stuck in their hats. And the other hikers cried, “Here come the Naked Ladies.”

From then on I was smitten by the spirit and the name. A favorite late summer Northern California image is of a flash of pink in a brown field with a swath of blue ocean for a backdrop.

Standing there in the sun, balanced on a tall thin stalk, reaching up on tiptoe, demanding attention, the Naked Lady tosses her tendrils after so many of the pretties in the garden have given up.

Named for its absence of leaves, the Naked Lady pops up around late August. A teacher friend said she always dreaded seeing them arrive because it meant school would soon start and her summer was over.

The Ladies returned this year about on time. I worried that they’d be off schedule like the tomatoes and every growing thing due to our chilly, gray summer. But the Naked Ladies expose their flesh no matter the temperature.

Confident, resilient beauties full of attitude, they are like so many ladies of late summer.

You see them standing in a row across a hill, the surviving residents of a one-time garden next to a one-time farmhouse. Whoever planted them has moved on, but the Ladies just keep on.

Sometimes you’ll see them in a chorus line, all leaning to one side, like they are ready to do a group shuffle-tap. Then there are the rogue Ladies, who just decided to show up in front of a cattle fence or pose next to a pile of rocks.

Certainly they’re not everyone’s favorite flower. Some find them quite gaudy and simply too bare without any foliage. And their perfume can be a problem. Sugary and cloying, the Naked Lady scent is best left outdoors to blow in the wind. Bring them in the house and the smell is as overwhelming as too much talcum in a hot yoga class.

But the sight of them is sweet. This week I stopped to admire one regal bloom on a bluff above Bodega Bay. It was a rare clear day and she waved to me from her perch in the brown grass. A fog horn wailed to say that darned old chilly marine layer is probably coming back.

But a lady, if she’s wise, knows to live in the moment.

I don’t know how long you have to live in the Bay Area to accept that our summers are stubborn. Lingering low clouds has pretty much been the lingering forecast. Here it is not the fog that creeps in on little cat feet but the sun. The fog rushes in like a pushy old uncle who stays past his welcome. The sun is a shy child who comes out for a brief wink.

For most of July the common grousing has been about a lack of sun. We call it ridiculous, even pukey. I would add disappointing but I can’t speak for all. The redwoods, I understand, simply adore a foggy summer.

California summers have always surprised visitors as well as locals. There’s the old Mark Twain comment that the coldest winter he ever spent was a summer in San Francisco. And what Giants fan has not suffered the chill of an August day game? Is there a Sonoma County child who does not equate summer swim lessons with blue lips and chattering teeth?

People here often refer to the summer weather as June gloom, which this season pushed into July.

How hot is it not?

It is so not hot that the first tomato I bought at our farmer’s market was from the northern California growing town of Winters. Where they have real summers. My own Early Girls are still rubbing their eyes and trying to wake up. The brave little Sun Golds are not much bigger than a goose bump.

It is so not hot that when we went to see Macbeth in the park, I wore gloves. My friends wore sleeping bags. Had the lovely Lady Macbeth not done herself in, she might have otherwise succumbed to pneumonia, walking around in bare feet and strapless gown.

One forgets from year to year. You dig out the linen pants and sandals, hang out the patio lights and cross your fingers. Here we do not rush the season, we wait for it. I saw one hopeful woman in shorts. But she was also wearing her Ugg boots.

Oh sure, we’ve had some irregular hot days when the newspapers shows kids eating ice cream in wading pools. Just like the rest of the country. Speaking of which, it has been so not hot here that a Californian can suffer Fahrenheit envy, maybe even wishing she were back in hot, sticky Pennsylvania.

It is so not hot here the dog runs inside and lies down expectantly in front of the gas heater, willing me to turn it on. No, I say, it’s not that cold. And yet I see wood smoke coming out of neighborhood chimneys.

A friend of my daughter’s on vacation from D.C. came over to borrow a bike and I apologized for our crummy weather. He looked at me like I was cracked. He’d been in three digit temperatures for days.

He doesn’t understand that some of us yearn to wake up with the sun on our pillow, to walk outside on a warm deck. To look forward to a balmy night when you can sit under the moon, barefoot and strapless.

But now, we must screw our courage to the sticking place and patiently wait for real summer. It’s usually here by September.

The last time I stared at the ocean with fear and awe from one of my favorite beaches was after the tsunami struck in the Indian Ocean in 2004. What if this pretty piece of the Pacific suddenly turned violent? What would happen to the beach-goers, the homes on the bluff, the town behind it and the campground on the bay? Why would Mother Nature show California any more mercy?

Now I go to the beach and worry not about a mean trick of Mother Nature but one caused by humans. And not just BP.

We take our dog to a beach in Marin County where she can run off leash. We get up early, swing by the bakery for coffee and a scone and head over the hills to Dillon Beach.

Rain or shine, we go. We’re not looking for a beach blanket day. We just want to make the dog happy and besides you never know what weather you’ll get at the beach.

One recent morning we found the beach eerily altered by a spectacular minus low tide. Hard white sand stretched out farther than we’ve ever seen. A group of people with British accents took off their shoes, rolled up their pants and waded right in, undaunted by the icy water.

Regardless of the weather, it’s worth the $7 they charge here for beach parking. They make their money on us because we rarely stay for more than a couple hours, by which time we’ve finished the coffee and the dog has had at least $7 worth of running her heart out after tennis balls.

Our beaches are pretty raw and open. They draw joggers and walkers, dreamers and shivering tourists. It is where the fog lives but also where the sun can make a final grand curtsy in a swirl of gold and pink.

So far there are no tar balls here. Our pelicans are safe. Nobody’s nervous about eating our oysters.

In 1989 the Exxon Valdez tanker ran aground up in Alaska and dumped oil into the clear and beautiful Prince William Sound. Alaskans called it “the day the water died.”
There were awful pictures then, too, of dead otters and birds. The Press Democrat, my former newspaper, examined the Alaska tragedy to consider what would happen if a similar spill occurred in our waters. If a tanker ran aground at Point Arena up in Mendocino County, within five days the slick would spread south to the Sonoma beaches and into Point Reyes in Marin. Within a month, it would reach all the way to Santa Barbara.

The report concluded we were not prepared, and the results would be devastating. Now the ugly toxins rage through the Gulf, and clearly no one there was prepared.

You don’t have to live along the ocean to consider the beach part of your back yard. It’s everyone’s natural habitat, but how many more chances do we get to save the water from dying? You look at those giant boulders that hunker in the water off our beaches and wonder how you’d ever get them cleaned of gunk.

We’ve been saying for a long time that we have to get over our dependence on oil. But we’re all addicts and nobody believes that we have the will or courage to do it. We have two cars in front of our house. But we only need one to get us to the beach and back.