It’s a cool and dark and undecided day and I am unsettled.
It’s trying to be 72° and sunny in October, obedient to the forecast. Yesterday was just as undecided, starting clear and sunny and heading toward warm but heavy overcast unexpectedly slid across the entire bowl of blue sky as if some unseen hand had pulled a blanket over us. Though the sun tried to peek around and through the clouds the overcast was absolute. The light dimmed, the leaves no longer fluttered in dappled sun, the birds no longer sang to each other from tree to tree, the temperature cooled at the beginning of what had been forecast to be a perfectly sunny and mild October week. No storms, not even rain, just a low gray sky and dank light. Today dawned just as dim and dark as the evening had ended yesterday.
A distant Nor’easter rolling up the east coast pushed the edges of its cloud cover all the way to Western Pennsylvania to dim these precious days. I feel unsettled because of it, because I have more energy on sunny days, I have much to do that I will enjoy doing, instead I am left with all my sunny day energy in this uninspiring weather, unable to do what I’d planned. And the second day of it felt foreboding, an unwelcome change that might be permanent.
But now I see lighter areas in the overcast, even bright areas, which means the clouds are thinning. Hazy areas of blue open up above me, with the promise of more to come. One wan beam of sunshine has reached down to my garden and briefly touched some scarlet and orange Virginia creeper leaves and changed everything.
When I decided to start recording my thoughts ten minutes ago all the sky that I could see was completely overcast, my back yard just as dark and still as it was yesterday. I had been moved to bring my coffee out to the garden and walk around the brick paths and look at my vegetables, something I do for necessity, fun and self-calming. The words came and started to form sentences so I decided to record my thoughts into voice to text.
But during the minutes I recorded my draft of the essay above the brighter areas in the clouds appeared and I looked up to see a spot of blue above my head. Over the next hour the overcast dissipated and all trace of clouds disappeared entirely, the temperature rising to a sweet 72, birds singing again, trees lightly swaying with the breeze, sounding like distant waves.
Changes come, in their own time.
“In Progress”
I’m calling this an “essay in progress” because, rather than waiting until I had the chance to work it over a few times, I would give it my best rewrite while the experience was still fresh. I like to do that with poems and a quick, brief essay can have the same treatment. It’s part of what I do to encourage myself to write, not trying to make everything perfect before I present it but giving the drafts themselves attention.
Here is the draft I recorded into my phone, saved as a text file. I like the simplicity of it but I didn’t think it caught my perceptions and reactions in a way that made the point about indecision, which was what inspired me to explore why I felt so unsettled. I may change my mind about that and edit:
It’s a cool and dark and undecided day. It’s trying to be 72° and sunny in October. Yesterday was the same, the bigger surprise because it was to be a perfectly sunny and mild October week. Instead a distant Nor’easter on the east coast has pushed the edges of its cloud cover all the way to Western Pennsylvania to dim this wonderful day. I feel unsettled because of it, because I have more energy on sunny days, I have much to do that I will enjoy doing, instead this weather has made me decide to do other things. Yesterday was a nearly uniform gray low cover of clouds, still, even the birds were quiet. Today I see some very light areas in the clouds which means they are thinning, and there are some hazy areas of blue moving in above me. One wan beam of sunshine has reached down to my garden and briefly touched some scarlet and orange Virginia creeper leaves and changed everything.
When I decided to start recording my thoughts just now, this guy was completely overcast, and my backyard just as dark as it was yesterday, but in the 5 minutes during which I recorded the paragraph above the brighter areas in the clouds moved in and I looked up to see a spot of blue above my head. Change is come, in their own time.
The painting is “The Last Bale, pastel, 7″ x 16″, 1996” by me. It is not my back yard, I painted it en plein air, standing in the field at a friend’s farm on a sunny and warm November afternoon in 1996 when, once again, a heavy overcast came from nowhere and blanketed everything. It wasn’t the sparkling afternoon I’d enjoyed with photography, but I decided to make something of it anyway. That sort of overcast doesn’t always make me feel unsettled—often I like it, and in this case catching that uncertain light and skies when the fields are spent, most leaves have fallen, and one round bale was left out in the field was more descriptive of that time of year, of the end of a year of farming, than a bright sunny day.
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