Vol. 1, No. 9
Sunday, January 4, 2004

This morning started out foggy, a carry-over from last night’s damp. As the dog and I walked, the fog lifted and the clouds began to dissolve, revealing patches of faded blue strewn with wisps of white and gray. Underneath this patchwork sky, the landscape was suffused with a glowing metallic light like the glint of hammered gold.

It was, by the time we met the bike path from Water Street, a shiny day: the birch saplings shone with a dark brown, gold-tricked sheen; the dried grass shimmered and shone gold. The world looked ripe and golden, a Hesperidean apple just right for the picking. Instead we walked on, the path under foot gleaming silver then steely in the slanting light, a small flock of keening finches looking for a moment like redpolls, of which we saw none.

In town, the dog and I scouted out street numbers, trying to locate the house where Henry David Thoreau’s mother was born. The numbers on Main Street, however, make little or no sense: entire blocks are unnumbered while elsewhere the numbers leap exponentially across empty lots. So I’ve yet to determine where Cynthia Dunbar Thoreau was born, although I know it was in an old house on Main Street here in Keene. In the meantime, I’ve found a tasty mystery to savor, another tidbit to stash in my pantry of choice bits.

On the way back home we walked down Grove then Foster Street, past the muddy path where we’d cut through not an hour earlier. And out of the corner of one eye, I saw large, silent brown wings zooming low in the trees.

It was, presumably, the same Cooper’s hawk I’ve seen here before, although at first glance it looked huge, large enough to be a red-tail. But since I saw it only askance, this hawk’s true identity remains a mystery: it was probably a Cooper’s, although my heart dreams that red-tails or even owls lurk in this neglected corner. Whatever breed of bird I saw, it was a skilled hunter: it had something unidentifiable dangling from his talons, another sort of tasty tidbit.

Now, however, I sit here writing at my ordinary kitchen table: that hawk has flown, and this morning’s fog has burnt away, leaving a cloud-mottled sky. Yesterday morning the skies were clear, with as much blue and light as one could stand; yesterday, strangely, I felt depressed and alone. Today, my soul finds solace in clouds: it’s comforting to have dark-knit skies hovering ever near, juts of light sneaking out from dark gray brows. A clear sky is an empty face--friendly, perhaps, but inscrutable. A cloudy or mixed sky is an eternal mystery, its light coming and going in an unpredictable and cheering dance.

It was such a mix of blue and gray that alerted me yesterday afternoon to take a walk, for when half the sky is dark and the other is blue, then Nature is warming for her best show, the clouds being lit askance by slanting glances of loveliness. It is in such chiaroscuro that you see a palette of color to rival any fall foliage, a skein of banded grays offset by green pine and rusty grass, the hillsides smudged with purple tree branches and reddish leaf buds. In such a light, dead leaves on trees shine golden like so many trinkets while roads and road signs, fence-posts and utility poles stand tricked in pewter.

It is these cloudy days that I love best, for they display true character: more than beautiful, they are sublime, mixing a shade of threat into every tableau. For clouds or rains that leave suddenly can return just as quickly, and nature’s fickle moods are part of her enduring charm. She who storms heavily also loves heartily, the two moods never being far apart.

The world outside as I sit here writing looks gray and dull, ordinary, no longer inlaid with gold and silver. Yesterday afternoon’s certain slants of light have come and gone, a reminder that the biggest virtue for any world-walker is the ability to drop everything and go when the light (and the going) looks good. The sun will shine tomorrow, and the clouds will come and go, hurried by time. And so shall sun and cloud chase and dance across these proscenium skies for ages. But this particular sky, these particular clouds, this particular arch and angle of light, will never pass this way again: that plane has flown, and it’s never coming back. So there’s no time to tarry, for the clouds never stop. We need to get out now while the getting’s good.

As I wrote that last paragraph, the sun came out briefly, illuminating this page and the entire room as if a god had stepped onstage and then fled. And now it’s back, this light, but it’s slowly fading: a flirtatious deity. This morning, as I read from May Sarton’s Journal of a Solitude, a similar light danced and teased, tripping across the page as I read of New Hampshire days some thirty years ago. I was struck at how Sarton describes the highs and lows that writers face: the depression and loneliness punctuated with moments of unmitigated joy. When I read Sarton, I realize the beauty that comes from simply seeing: it’s not about Sarton, but what she’s seen. That’s what interests me, or any of her readers, even if what she sees is light falling on a daffodil that’s been dead for thirty years. That daffodil is long dead, but the light that fell on it is not.

I don’t know what it is on cloudy days, or any day, that causes my soul to sing unbidden. You may call it God if you wish, or you may use some other name, or none. All I know is that at this minute a single ray of sunlight rends a leaden bank of clouds, piercing the blinds to illuminate my page and then, in a wink, disappears. Whatever spirit or power it is that fuels this flirtation, I entirely adore. I’m not interested in what people call this Mystery that illuminates the world, my page, or our brief daffodil lives. What interests me is that people pursue it as it comes and goes, coyly, and then that they tell us, the rest of the wondering world, what it is that they saw.

The blessed ordinary unfolds as perfectly today as it does everyday, gurgling in time like water. These moments, played by shadow-puppets, are given by an unseen hand, and what is given is in turn required. When the giver of this ordinary demands his moments back, with interest, what will we be able to offer? How much of our time and light have we spent, how much of our time and light have we wasted, and how much of our time and light have we invested, planted like a mustard seed in the soil of our lives, to bear even larger fruit than our arms can bear? After our own light passes, shrouded in cloud, what shadows of our own making will remain?

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