Crowned

Growing up in Austin during the 1950's, summers were quite a different prospect.  We were required to handle soaring temperatures without the benefit of central air conditioning.  The expense and relative ineffectiveness of sputtering window units meant after the dinner table was cleared but before the dishes were done, our family and most of our neighbors promptly abandoned hot kitchens and stuffy houses, spilling out to gather on one centrally located front lawn.

Teen agers took advantage of otherwise empty houses to use the telephone. Folding chairs aligned, the women of our block drank iced tea out of sweating jewel toned aluminum glasses, gossiped, and supervised while we played and our fathers watered dying lawns.  It was a time of record heat and drought. Everybody watched the skies.

As kids we were only too happy for a last chance to play before baths and bedtimes conspired to put the end to another day.  We would mostly ignore the adults, but occasionally a skinned knee or hurled insult would find me standing next to my mother's lawn chair, picking at some loose strand of plastic webbing while I nursed wounded feelings and soaked in grownup conversation.

I'd occasionally overhear the phrase "Violet Crown" used to describe a lovely purplish haze that would set up around sunset when the atmospheric conditions were just so.  As a child I loved it when the sky blazed colors of any sort, but that rare purple ring seemed especially magical to me.  The idea the sky made a crown for the place where I lived aligned beautifully with my princess-in-a-magical-kingdom world view.

Fast forward mumbledy-some years.  As decades passed, ongoing development and maturing trees combined to interrupt most of Austin's previously unobstructed sunset views.  It had been eons since I'd seen or even thought of a violet crown.  Then last November while tromping the East Austin Studio Tour, I was thrilled when my vantage point at the the last studio complex we visited afforded me a clear view of a classic Austin Violet Crown sunset.

Without my camera I couldn't get a decent shot, so I did my best with my phone.  I quietly pointed the phenomenon out to those standing around me and we appreciatively turned our eyes away from the intentionally created art for just a few moments to stop and share beauty in the sky.  

I'm unable to avoid an especially mangled metaphor to tell you, but as to conditions favorable for violet crowns?  When it rains, it pours.  Even though a much rarer occurrence than happens at sunset, Austin's iconic Violet Crown can also occur in the morning while the sun is still quite low on the horizon.

As happened to my surprise and delight yesterday. Camera at hand this time, I hustled out to capture a shot before the sun traveled high enough for the angle and intensity of the light to rinse the color out of the morning sky.

I realize all towns everywhere are beautiful in their own way, and views much grander than ours are relatively easy to find.  Maybe it represents me clinging to some last vestige of that princess mindset, but there is something so wistful and wonderful about Austin's temporarily violet skies. Something gentle, and extravagantly unnecessary. That ephemeral numinosity promises me there are mysteries yet to be revealed, marvels lingering just beyond a purple horizon.

And that's all the Happily Ever After I need.

Drawn out

I absolutely can't help myself.  When I see swaths of pink in the morning skies I am simply pulled outside to dawdle and gawk a while.  As my gaze was directed upwards today I was similarly struck by a starkly lit moon.  Without intervening atmosphere or trees, the morning sun can be harsh indeed.

Of course once I was outside, I realized there was a bit of early morning detective work to do, and potentially some clean up as well.

I knew "snails" as an abstraction were putting holes in the leaves of coneflower plants I'd recently brought home from the nursery, but whenever I checked the leaves during the day, they were persistently unpopulated.  Not so this morning.

I gathered up and tossed at least half a dozen snails in specificity, rudely interrupting the morning meet up at the coneflower bar.  Including one especially cheeky snail who apparently thought it could get away with nibbling on that nursery trip's impulse buy, a deep pink coneflower.  Sorry Mr. Snail, the bar is closed.  You don't have to go home, but you can't stay here.

On that same trip to the nursery, I made a planned purchase in the form of a handful of tropical milkweed plants.  I have eventual hopes of luring migrating monarchs into our spaces.  I say eventual, because the plants haven't bloomed quite yet, and there isn't anything currently for the butterflies to feed on. That hasn't stopped a small colony of yellow aphids or the ladybug I saw drawn to them yesterday.  They were all busy feeding in turn.

This morning the ladybug had moved on, so I took my garden paintbrush and carefully brushed as many of the rest of the aphids off into a soap bath as I could reach.  The milkweed cafe is temporarily closed, hopefully to reopen under new floral management.  With any luck there will be monarchs nectaring at this neighborhood eatery very soon.

No sky lovelier

November Skies

Than these November skies 

Is no sky lovelier. The clouds are deep; 

Into their grey the subtle spies 

Of colour creep, 

Changing that high austerity to delight, 

Till ev'n the leaden interfolds are bright. 

And, where the cloud breaks, faint far azure peers 

Ere a thin flushing cloud again 

Shuts up that loveliness, or shares. 

The huge great clouds move slowly, gently, as 

Reluctant the quick sun should shine in vain, 

Holding in bright caprice their rain. 

And when of colours none, 

Not rose, nor amber, nor the scarce late green, 

Is truly seen, -- 

In all the myriad grey, 

In silver height and dusky deep, remain 

The loveliest, 

Faint purple flushes of the unvanquished sun. 

John Freeman

announcing your place in the family of things

Have you noticed lately how amazing the display has been each dawn when the rising sun hits our quotidian low clouds?  I've made it a practice this November to rise early enough to have coffee readied, allowing me to stir gratitude along with the cream into my first cup of the day, gazing out in quiet wonder at the shifting pink and gold tones of scattering light.

Occasionally I take my camera outside along with my coffee.  As part of my ongoing "we do SO get Fall color, only it looks like THIS" conversation with family members who live out of state, I try to capture in images the ongoing fireworks in our clouds.   

As I reluctantly turned away from the sun to go back indoors the other morning, I was surprised by the sight of a skein of geese migrating South in absolute silence.  I laughed to myself, thinking this particular flock must be populated with creatures who were simply "not morning birds", preferring to wing their way towards winter sanctuary sans the typical vocalise.    

Overcome with joy, I watched in appreciative admiration until they disappeared from view.  This flock did not announce my place in the family of things with their voices, but as I struggled to imagine their experience of flying through each glimmering dawn, their transit through my morning sky offered me kinship sufficient to the day.

Wild Geese

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting-
over and over announcing your place
In the family of things. 

Mary Oliver