Friday Ramble - August Musics

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. This morning's sky has no need of a old hen with her camera and notebook, but I just have to say something.

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).

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.  My camera carrying exercises are still brief, but I am already thinking of acquiring another lens or two, more tubes of  scarlet, gold and indigo for my paint box.

What a show the cosmos puts on when Beau and I go out to greet these August mornings together. Barefoot, I sip my tea and try to capture a few images. My companion looks up at the sky and all around, his eyes round in wonder and his expressive tail waving like a metronome.  Flocks of Canada geese are flying up from a night on the river and out into farm fields to feed; there is wave upon wave of happy honking as they pass over our heads. Their joyous, almost symphonic presence among the clouds is a clear indication that summer is waning. For all that, there is magic everywhere, and there is music.

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, how full of wonder, and how fleeting. My image and little net of words are woefully inadequate, but they will do.