We awakened once more to a day shrouded in shades of gray, rain and fog and lowering clouds seemingly having pulled the light and color from the land. Normally, this is a time of brilliant sun, skies the shade of cornflowers and air of crystalline clarity, but our seemingly departed monsoon season has returned, at least for the moment.
The forecast suggests that the sun will return by afternoon, but there is a chill in the air and sharp edge on the wind. If the clouds do indeed clear by day’s end, the peaks will be dusted with white.
In an ordinary year, our world would be slowly shifting from green to gold now, a steady gradient change over a period of weeks that foretells the orange and red fire yet to come, before winter truly takes hold and the earth shifts to the grays and browns that await their snowy blanket. Autumn here used to be a season in full, beginning at the start of September with the subtlest of shifts in the feel of the air and stretching mostly until November’s end. In between, there may be random snows, but this has always been the land that comes alive in fall, beneath the medicine light of a sharp-angled sun.
The last two or three years have not followed that pattern. Drought has taken root here in ways that the region’s broader long-term drought had until now been unable to do. The trees begin yellowing in July, even June — no longer a turning of their robes but rather a patching of them, as though summer has become threadbare and the only material available for mending it belongs to autumn.
Now heading into the downward slope of September, we should be entering a season of aspen gold and sky blue. Last year, we had precious little of the former, the leaves burning and turning fast to brown: The image above was the one and only shot Wings was able to capture then of molten leaves against the indigo. Of the latter, there had been too much all year long, with no rainy season at all. This year, the rains have come, if not on their usual schedule, but their late presence risks the kind of early freeze that may deprive us of autumn’s fire yet again.
For the moment, the last two hummingbirds sit outside the window, alternating between the feeders and an aspen nearly bare. The smaller of the two maples stands outside the other window, wavering ever so slightly in the wind, only minute amounts of green among the crimson and rust. And still the clouds hover close, as though held fast by gravity, unable or unwilling to let the turquoise vault behind them show off its jewel tones.
For the moment, there is a fire in the woodstove, warming the house against the chill of the rain. If we are lucky, we shall still be granted a little golden light today, by way of the sun if not the leaves, a little bit of indigo in the sky: the shades of water and fire ushering in this autumn’s birth. For this day, it will have to be enough.
~ Aji
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