Winter has returned in force, and we live now in the season of the storm.
Here, that means many things, from unsettled weather to extremes of temperature, gale-force winds and waves of snow. In this place, it’s possible to have both simultaneously: big heavy flakes falling from a sky lit with brilliant sun, and a fifty-degree wing of the mercury in less than a single day.
Recent days have reminded us of such elemental tendencies, and of the risks they pose. At this season, our world is lit with a fierce light in a dangerous blue.
Wings captured this image three days ago: Friday, well past midday, via his cell-phone camera from atop the horses’ stalls. He was up there sweeping the last of the snow off, most of it by then melted into a heavy wet blanket. A new storm system hovered over the western horizon, still well beneath the blinding glare of the afternoon sun and trying to gather strength and speed and mass. It was evidence of the wild beauty of this place, shades of cobalt and cornflower lit from without and within by a silver less molten than iridescent.
Shortly thereafter, I was forced to run a couple of errands in view of the long weekend upcoming. By the time I left, the clouds had amassed into a a solid blue-black wall, the sun a single radiant point of light at their upper rising above their upper boundaries. It seemed that more snow was a sure thing, at the very least; so late in the day, with nightfall looming, the sky spoke of perilous journeys along a risky path.
There would be no snowfall, as it turned out, but the fall of the light was a phenomenon entirely unto itself: touching down upon hay barn and chicken coop, thence to the ground beneath, fanning out across the snow-white earth and lending its glow to the sign on the back of a barn, excised from the campaign sign, a decade ago and more, of a good man whose own illuminating the light the larger world could use now.
At the moment, we are awaiting another storm, albeit without Friday’s fierce light, or its dangerously beautiful blue. Today’s sky is one that doesn’t inspire much confidence in the forecast, its decisiveness notwithstanding. The forecast winds, equally slow to materialize, might blow it out before it has a chance to deliver so much as a single flake.
In the meantime, we are buffeted by storms of other sorts, with conditions at least as perilous as those of the next blizzard to befall us. In the meantime, it’s useful to focus on the message of the image above: It is the dangerous blue of the impending storm that creates the illuminating beauty of the fiercest of lights.
~ Aji
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