The last week of March, and it’s all brutal winds and bitter cold.
Last week brought us snow, even ice, and yet it feels far colder this week, mercury notwithstanding. The winds cut as sharp and as deep as any scalpel’s blade, and leave about as much damage in their wake.
Two days ago, we had mud everywhere, the kind so deep and slick that it’ll pull the very earth out from under your feet.
Today, it’s all dry again, raising the spectre of a repeat of last year, when wildfire season came months early, and with no precipitation to counter or control it.
Today, the skies are blue, with giant puffs of gray-white clouds reaching everywhere . . . and already, I find myself unconsciously scanning the horizon, just to make sure that those puffs are indeed clouds and not a deadly pyrocumulus threat.
Even the nascent green of the last week seems paler now.
If this is what’s in store, it’s going to be a long, hard spring.
Sometimes it’s better to focus on more sere landscapes than the ones that were only recently so lush. Not so that we wont be disappointed, although there’s that, too; more to find reassurance, inspiration, the promise, fulfilled, that there will be, among the rocks, a healing green renewal.
The image above that is the subject of this week’s Monday Photo Meditation is a case in point, albeit one from when conditions here were unquestionably better: Wings shot this one on film, part of a small series of shots taken among the rocky sandstone outcroppings high above the Great River that runs alongside us, southern bound. It’s an image with seemingly very little color to it at all, although if you were to compare it with a black-and-white version of the same shot, you’d see just how much color there is, how vibrant and intense, even in such arid landscapes. This one is composed (naturally; no editing or filters here) of differing shades of only four colors: browns and grays and greens and golds. Even the blue has been leached out of the sky, leaving the dove-colored hues of thin early-spring clouds in its wake.
My father, accustomed to homelands of big waters and abundant rain, hated what he called the dullness of it when forced to move here for his health long ago. But children acclimate more rapidly, and if it’s not quite true that I noticed its beauty back then, I at least was able to see it as a new normal. Having moved between these lands, my homelands, and the East Coast over the years of young adulthood, I also learned to appreciate the gifts each region offered us.
And despite the arid desertscapes here, much of the land in this particular place has traditionally been reminiscent of my lusher, greener home.
Until now.
But despite the ravages of recent years, there are still hardy blades of grass on the ground outside the window, growing in bunches. On less windy days, they reach for the sky, although now every blade is bent double. There is no green on the trees, but the catkins are lively with the promise of leaves to come. And should we venture to higher elevations, all coniferous slopes or mesquite-studded crags, we would see, among the rocks, a healing green renewal. Even from here, we can see some of them at a distance, even if they are too far and high to see the truth of their colors now.
In these cold, dark days, we take hope where we find it.
~ Aji
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