Electric Night

Lightning illuminated the clouds frequently last night -- flashes revealing detail then flickering out to leave deeper darkness -- but no sound of thunder came. Silent lightning fascinates me. It reminds me of the northern lights, and I could watch it for hours. Yet with all the aerial activity, only a few brief sprinkles of rain fell, releasing that intense scent which arrives only with the beginning of a storm and is soon washed away. With the failure of the rain to continue, the scent lingered a long time. After a while, the clouds began to break and a few stars appeared. Now, the remaining clouds collect the rays of the unrisen sun and flush mauve and pink. It will probably be a nice day.

All yesterday I though it was Tuesday, and didn't realize it was Wednesday until I turned on the television for a while. It's so easy to lose track of time when the activities of each day are much the same. I would know what day it was if I looked at those headings on my friends page, but I never notice them. And speaking of friends pages, and days, Thursday is usually the busiest day of the week on my friends page, though I have no idea why. All I know is that when I wake up this afternoon, there will probably be a goatload of new posts waiting to be read. I'd better get to sleep so I'll be well rested when I deal with them.

The Day Between Forgotten

The day was framed by two unusual events. This morning, as I went out for a last sniff of the air before bed, I saw a deer up the block, headed my way. I hurried back in to fetch the camera, and when I got back to the front door I saw that there were three deer. Dawn had not yet arrived, but the gray light revealed them quite clearly -- at least to my eye, though I'm not so sure about the camera, its lens being rather slow. But the deer saw me, too. They continued on their way, pausing a few times to look at me, especially when they heard the camera shutter click. They were wary but not alarmed, and paused to nibble some roses before casting me a final backward glance and vanishing into the orchard. This is only the third time I've seen deer on the street so near dawn. I managed to snap three pictures, but I'm not expecting them to turn out very well. If my old Olympus still worked, the pictures would have been fine, as it had a surprisingly fast lens for a point-and-shoot camera.

The other event was the evening itself. There are certain evenings here when the clouds gather in the east to cast the mountain ridges into deep shadow, the forest horizon becomes a mauve haze, and the rising masses of cloud catch the last rays of the vanished sun and reflects them with such intensity as to drop shadows from the eaves of the eastern walls of houses. The walls themselves then flush as with an inner light, as do the boles of trees, the petals of roses, the yellow explosions of scotch broom, the crowns of the apple orchard's newly leafed trees, and everything exposed to that extraordinary bloom of heavenly light which passes from white, to pink, to lavender, while the glowing world slowly fades. These few moments of evanescent luminance are astonishing. They are like a visual manifestation of ethereal music, or of an exotic fragrance which unexpectedly scents the soft air of common day. It feels as though time has caught its breath in astonishment, and hangs there for a moment, rapt, like a hummingbird feeding on the sweetest nectar imaginable.