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.

We hear it every summer from visitors. “Why is it so brown here?” they ask, especially the ones who come from green summer places. They ask it almost accusingly, like there’s been a mistake. They point to the California hills as if we hadn’t noticed that they are not the standard color for the season.

The answer is that brown is our summer color. Our summers are dry. Nobody’s walking through our hills with a watering can. It doesn’t rain here like it does in the green summer places. If they want a green California they should come back in late winter or early spring, when their home ground is still hard and frozen and we are so green we squeak.

I sympathize. I grew up in places with humid green summers and for a long time the California brown looked alien. Wild west and untamed. Naked and brazen. And I can still get a longing for a leafy dripping landscape and extravagant rolling lawns. I came across a newspaper photo of a summer scene of upstate New York that was so drenched and verdant I wanted to do a scratch and sniff.

But I’m a Californian. This is my chosen turf. And in summer I accept that brown is our green.

My California daughter tells her frowning New York friends to think of the summer color as golden if brown turns them off. Golden sounds more lively and cheerful but there are ways to spin brown. The hills of summer look like a nice baguette. They are the shade of a rich café au lait. How about, the color of a used saddle? Or an old rumpled corduroy jacket?

I once described the California summer hills as looking like teddy bear tummies. Fuzzy brown and soft. Of course, they appear more soft than they actually are. Get up close and those grasses are prickly. Alive with slithery creatures. Dogs run through and come home full of foxtails. And there’s always a worry about fire because they look like they’re already half-scorched.

In summer, brown is our green

Last week I drove with friends through the dry back country to a party at a sheep farm in Petaluma. That all-beige backdrop makes it so much better to see stands of black cows and wild turkeys and the neon bright jerseys from a steady stream of bicyclists.

The party, a fundraiser for the upcoming Sonoma County Book Festival which happens on Sept. 19, was one of many summer celebrations of the good stuff that grows up and over and all around these hills. Author Jonah Raskin read from his new book “Field Days: A Year of Farming, Eating and Drinking Wine in California.” We got dust in our sandals and ate all-local ratatouille and goat cheese pizza with syrupy sun-gold tomatoes.

As we drove home the fog started to come in. Visitors often don’t appreciate our fog either. How comes the nights are so cold, they grumble. The fog is our natural misting machine. And sometimes when the sun is dropping away and the fog is sliding in, those hills don’t look all that brown. They look kind of, well… some might call them mauve.

Photo courtesy of Michelle Pereira