Light

The light today was as thin as dried grass.  It was the light of grays—no shadows, no yellows.

Despite the weakness of the light, it was a pleasure to walk. I have hardly looked-up beyond my computer monitor for three weeks.  Three weeks of early mornings and late nights.  I only discovered this morning a large branch blown from my larch by a storm a week ago. 

The week-old effects of the windstorm lay still in the woods. The forest floor had a thick new carpet that was a textured cross-hatching of yellow and orange larch needles.  Brown and green polygons of ponderosa pine needles overtopped the larch carpet.  Short branches of pine and Douglas fir lay on the trail.  The leaves on these branches pointed still to the sky and around, holding their phyllotactic helices.  How many days will it be until their turgidity is lost or hikers tramp them into the mat of the forest floor? 

When I stepped out of the forest, the wind on the ridge was stiff and cold.  I hunched my shoulders against it and zipped my layers tight against my neck.  Where the Blue Mountains swell the southern horizon, there were distant patches of snow.  There was snow, too, on the hills to the east.  The season has been changing while I’ve been enclosed by work.  This week I want more light.

Comments

[Laura]

Such a pleasure to read what you write, Larry. Hope your heavy work period is over.

[Clare]

One of the things that I most love about living here is the light, how it is never static but always changes. Right now, 8:30 am, there is just the hint of it on the southern horizon, colouring the sky in those exquiste indigo tones.

[larry]

Laura--thanks for your note--I hope there will be more writing and less all-consuming work.

Clare--Life at a high latitude must surely select for a sensitivity to the subtle varieties of light, and, perhaps also, to the different kinds of darkness. That attraction of Arctic light is something I can understand, and I hope sometime to experience.