When it’s being friendly, the morning sun announces itself as a golden glimmer outlining the neighbor’s redwood tree. Finally it blasts through the bedroom blinds, lighting up the room, coming on so strong that inevitably someone says, “Hey, would you get those blinds, it’s too bright to read the newspaper.”

What? Shut out the very sun we’ve been longing for? Do you want to jinx summer? Wasn’t it only a week ago we turned on the heater and pulled out the down vests? In June!

That was during the odd cold and heavy late spring rains which caused locals to grumble about the June gloom, trading weather gripes on Facebook which must have looked pretty silly to people dealing with serious weather. But even I, who likes to Pollyanna the weather by chirping “the sun is out there somewhere,” joined the grousing and posted a photo of my wet dog looking pitiful in her yellow slicker.

But now, as I write this, there have been sunny mornings and daytime temperatures near 90 and people are declaring that summer is finally here. Even though our coastal NorCal weather is never finally anything. Typically our summer weather is a fog sandwich – gray mornings and cool nights with heat in the middle.

On days of full sun you can water the vegetables in shorts. You can even plan a dinner outside.

The late spring storms messed with the grape crop, cancelled town barbecues and forced Wine Country weddings inside. They also created a rare lush green landscape, untypical for this place this time of year which is normally starting to fade to brown. This year the grasses stayed green and the hydrangeas hung heavy and sodden. I said, “It looks like a summer back East.” And those fluffy high clouds that dance across the sky make me think of lazy warm days in the Midwest.

But the Midwest, beyond its pretty clouds, has been swamped by record flooding and killer tornadoes. And the people back East, having just finished with record blizzards, are dealing with the kind of record heat and humidity typically reserved for August.

Everything’s topsy-turvy. Did somebody say “climate change?”

A new study by the Yale Project on Climate Change shows that more people do believe in global warming but not enough. Half of Americans believe that global warming is causing or worsening coastal erosion, fires, hurricaines and flooding. But many think environmental disasters happen in other places.

In a recent newspaper piece, climate activist Bill McGibben challenged any thinking person paying attention to recent weather catastrophes to scoff at climate change. Isn’t this what climatologists have been predicting for years. “That as we flood the atmosphere with carbon we will also start both drying and flooding the planet.”

Paul Krugman wrote a column connecting the dots between the series of droughts and floods, disrupted ag production and rising world-wide food prices. Amy Goodman pointed out what innovative countries are doing to create new energy systems and green jobs while the Obama administration gifts more billions in subsidies to oil, coal and nuclear industries.

Of course they’re all liberal thinker-writers and some people still think that global warming is liberal hype. The Yale study did say more Democrats believe in climate change than Republicans.

Meanwhile, I’m looking for some more sunny summer days like they have other places. Enough to encourage the tomatoes, but not too much to exhaust the lettuce. And then the morning fog can creep back and we can grump and grumble. Because if the fog stays away and it really starts to look and feel like back East or the Midwest in the summer, then we’ve got trouble.

When the red-eye to Boston landed I looked out the window and chirped “it’s snowing!”

“Yesss,” groaned the women next to me, obviously immune to my delight. Big deal, snow in January.

I should have confessed I have a strange snow lust. Tell her about how every January I start to worry about winter passing me by. If I haven’t yet managed to talk someone into going to Tahoe I feel deprived. It’s a lost season if I make it through winter without digging out thick wool sweaters or needing a pair of tights under my jeans.

Yet it is unnecessary for me to sit in coastal California and long for snow when I know people who live where winter is true and cold. That includes my sister in Massachusetts which has been walloped by continuous snow storms, record low temperatures and having what she calls “a real winter winter.”

I called her during one white-out and she said she couldn’t see out of any window in her house. I sighed with envy and asked if I could come for a visit. Sure, as long as I took the shuttle from the airport. Another storm was on its way and she wasn’t driving into Boston.

The weather gods delivered. The newspapers complained about another nasty blast of winter. TV interviewers talked to dreary locals about how sick they were of snow. But it was just what I wanted.

The beach down the road from my sister’s house was covered with unmarked powder, the salt marsh an ice sculpture, the clam flats frozen over. We drove up to even snowier New Hampshire and the White Mountains into a white-on-white world that looked like a photo spread in Yankee magazine.

I snow-shoed beside a river as snow sifted through birch trees as fast as fog sweeping through the redwoods. I threw myself into a snow bank and made a snow angel.

I trace my shivery needs to growing up in Connecticut and Pennsylvania. Winter meant rolling around outside like a baby bear, trussed up in snowsuits, skating on ponds, sledding down hills. All the fun stuff. I moved to California in my 20s, apparently before I’d had my fill of snow and ice and before winter became a grown-up hardship.

Come November I start decorating the house with snow images. I stick museum postcards of snow scenes in the mirrors. A picture of a woman dancing in the snow is on the bookcase. A photo of a woman doing a yoga pose by an icy lake on the bathroom wall. My Google home page has a scene of ski trails through trees. Top of my seasonal playlist is Sting’s “If on A Winter’s Night.”

I recognize the miseries of those who work, commute and shovel their way through a prolonged winter. I was only there for a week but I know about chapped lips, flat fly-away hair and dry skin. I suffered from leaky boots and inadequate head gear and caught a cold probably because I went on a sleigh ride in a ball cap instead of one of those dorky wool hats with ear flaps. Or maybe it was sitting in the snow in a hot tub.

Yet, I think that a “real winter winter” must be good for the psyche. It toughens a person. Makes the blood quicken. Snaps you to attention. The raw cold and the icy beauty is a sharp reminder that mother nature, even when fiddled with, is still the boss.

The morning I flew from Boston temperatures were creeping toward zero. Six hours later we landed in San Francisco where temperatures had been weirdly warm in the 60s. The flight attendant said it was now safe to remove our down jackets.

This Christmas the Texas daughter and her family will not be coming this way for the holidays so I went to Austin for a pre-Noel visit. I wanted to make sure she didn’t miss anything not being in California. We talked about doing some of our traditional things, maybe go to the Nutcracker or a Christmas concert. But in keeping with the spirit of Austin, a city proud of its weirdness, we opted for new traditions.

First was a Julia Child dinner party where guests were urged to bring recipes from Mastering the Art of French Cooking. Our hosts dressed as Julia and Paul, one in polyester knit dress and high heels and his partner in goatee and beret. We dined on dishes awash in butter and cheese and trilled “bon appetit’ in our most flamboyant Julia voices while visions of the real Julia flashed on a big screen next to a Christmas tree.

At another Austin holiday gala we mingled with the pretty people in a cocktail lounge of a downtown hotel where the bar stools are made out of hairy white cowhide. When she lived in San Francisco daughter Sam and her sisters and girlfriends would put on their holiday glitz and take over a bar in one of the city’s hotels. Not yet having a core group in Austin she invited a random mix of women she met through her book club, the neighborhood, the gym and a stepmothers group to dress in their merriest and meet for drinks. They showed up and brought friends. I was the token import, dressed in Wine Country casual and wishing for a pair of cowboy boots.

She’ll be fine in Texas for Christmas. Her new Austin ways mix well with a number of California holiday favorites. She’s made her grandmother’s Russian tea cookies. For Christmas dinner she’ll make the family spinach and walnut salad, as well as some new dish “from Julia.”

Her tree is decorated with familiar ornaments. I spotted the tiny rocking horse made out of red felt that her grandmother gave her when she was two. And she still has the music box covered with Santa elves from when she was a baby. It’s pretty beat up but still produces a jaunty “Jingle Bells.”

Christmas is not always so portable. There were two Christmases that I spent without any family. They were the years my husband and I lived in Germany and although our daughters were in California I looked forward to the two of us having a cozy, festive holiday in Europe. The first Christmas my husband, flying from Nairobi to Frankfurt, ended up stuck at an airport in London, leaving me with the cat. Some friends took pity and asked me to dinner, and the traveler got back late that night but in time for dessert.

Another Christmas the two of us took the train to Italy to a small mountain village where it snowed and was perfectly festive until Santa took a slip on the ice outside the hotel on Christmas Eve. A cab driver, heaped in holiday good will, took him down the mountain to a hospital to have x-rays on his back. He was okay but they kept him overnight for observation and I returned to the hotel to drink Chianti with the ghosts of Christmas past.

This year the family will be at home for Christmas, both in California and Texas. And God bless us everyone for Skype.

Susan Swartz is an author and journalist in Sebastopol, Ca. You can also read her at www.juicytomatoes.com and hear her Another Voice commentary on KRCB-FM radio on Fridays. Email is susan@juicytomatoes.com