The Music of August Mornings

You try, really try, to describe something that is quite beyond description. Are you aware that it is so? You are indeed, but you try to describe it anyway and make a complete shambles of the exercise.

Morning skies in August are intense happenings, early sunlight burnishing clouds into brilliance and lighting up contrails against skies that often as not have a touch of violet in them.  Sometimes, everything up there looks like stained glass.  There are high fluffy streaks from horizon to horizon, strands of light touching everything with copper and oro pallido - the pale lustrous gold that only visits the world at the beginning of day (although Tuscan skies sometimes held such wonders in late afternoon when I was a student there many years ago).  One thing is certain - you need a large brush to paint such sweeping confetti colored expanses, lenses that can take in the great wide world from here to there.  I will not be able to carry a camera for another few weeks, but I am already thinking of acquiring another lens or two, more tubes of  scarlet, gold and indigo for my paint box.

Spencer and I went out to greet the morning together as usual, although I am supposed to stay indoors for a while longer.  Barefoot, I sipped my tea as my faithful companion looked up and around, his expressive tail waving like a metronome.  Geese were flying up from their night on the river and out into the corn to feed, giving voice to vast waves of joyous honking as they passed overhead on their way to farm fields beyond the village and the river.

Late summer mornings in the north have always been like this, full of light and texture and color and sound. This is the traditional music of August, "the music of what happens" as the season draws to a slow and honeyed close. How amazing it all is, and how fleeting.