Cloudrise

My last day here in Old Home. Sigh. Every time I come here, I miss it more.

The rain stopped sometime early this morning. Looking out the computer room window, a thick blanket of fog has covered the hill. At this height it's probably not fog so much as clouds on their way to mountains, bringing fresh snow.

Leaning over a little bit, I can see down into the Upper Meadow. The rain has collected at the bottom of the Meadow into a long broad steel gray pond, reflecting the cloud light, waiting to getting through the drainage pipe and start its long trip to the sea. The horses meander to the edge of it, perhaps trying to find their way around or maybe just to spend some more time under the two pine trees that so often provide them shelter.

The clouds are moving on now, the boles of the pine trees dark brown with the water from the night before. Around the bases of the trees the rust-red dead pine needles accentuate the darkness of their trunks.

It's sufficiently cleared now that I can see to the trees marking the Eastern edge of my parents' property, tall sentinels rising over the smaller trees and field underneath them. I wish the clouds were thick enough to give the appearance of furled banners around their trunks; I seem to be denied my wish this morning.

The cloudlight is as bright as it will probably get today, shedding all the light they are likely to today. The light seems to mute whatever green I see on the hillside, bringing out the browns and yellows and rusts of the dormant grasses waiting for Spring.

I will have to tear myself away from this in a few moments: reality in the form of breakfast and packing and driving and flying beckon me, the onrush of a life that does not stop but is only set aside for a little while. But for a few more precious minutes I will deny that such a reality exists as I watch the winter cycle work its way across the morning skies.