Light

Some morning I am going to stay out there and watch it happen.  I take the puppy out for his morning performance at around 5:30.  I have never considered myself a morning person, but that time of day has some charms.  For one thing, our street is quiet - nothing to distract puppy from the prompt performance of his duty - and for another, there are stars.  Right now Orion is overhead, slightly to the south.  Or, at least in the direction I think of as south.  I have found that my sense of direction does not always align with compasses and such.  At eleven o'clock at night, he is over the back yard - I can just see him over the roof, but, six hours later, he is over the front yard.

An hour of so later, when I leave for work, the stars are gone and this day features an odd clarity, a result of the indirect light, I suppose, before the sun actually rises.  All those structures and trees which, less than an hour earlier were indefinite masses, are granted an extraordinary sharpness.  Sometimes they are so clear that they look like stage sets, two-dimensional cut-outs rather than the real thing.

Then there are the colors: when I got in the car this morning, the sky on the horizon was distinctly baby blue shading upward into a distinct pastel pink.  How does blue shade into pink?  The colors were very definite and there was no clear demarcation between them, perhaps I should consult a watercolorist. At any rate, by the time I reached the corner (three houses away) the whole thing had shifted into a light clear yellow at the horizon which paled into white and at some point became the so-called "normal" blue sky.

The sun is so low still as I drive down the highway that the roadbed itself casts a shadow on the weeds along the side of the road.  It is so low that it shines under the cars on the road and their shadows on that shadow line of the roadbed show the light shining under them making them car-shaped (or van-shaped or pick-up shaped) instead of just fast-moving masses.

And this morning the lights are with me.  In spite of starting out a little later than I like, the parking lot is almost empty, my preferred parking place is vacant, and the lights in the department are not even turned on yet.