This is the hard part of spring.
The weather is a web, holding one fast: Work your way around it so that you are upright and facing a warming sun, and then the snow returns, falling through the lines of the day to turn the world cold again.
A week ago, highs were in the seventies. Four days ago, we had fourteen inches of snow. Today, that snow is all gone, save for a few small patches in permanent shadow, and the mercury is expected to rise near sixty again . . . and rain and snow are projected for tonight and the next two days. Climate change has brought us summer monsoonal weather patterns even as temperature and time remain stubbornly stuck in the first days of spring.
It’s impossible to adjust in real time; the best we can do is go with the flow of the curves and hang onto the lines, and seek what shelter is available.
In this place, especially in this season, shelter is too often a mirage, an illusion, optical and otherwise. This is the time when world and weather draw lines, visible to us but not truly tangible, as ethereal and evading of our grasp as the wisps of smoke that rise from the chimneys in the icy dawn air. Yes, we can see them, and we know they represent protection of a sort . . . but the hard reality of the world in this season tells us that such protection is as fleeting and ephemeral as the spicy scent of piñon vanishing upon the wind.
For now, it must be enough to navigate by the cornflower sky and the violet clouds that will inexorably approach come afternoon, enough to seek protection within the piñon, arbor lines and swirling smoke alike — to find shelter, between sun and shadow.
~ Aji
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