LIGHT

Dawn breaks though the windows this morning, streaming in through the eastern panes in great hazy shafts of lemon, corn husk, goldenrod and dream. Braided into thick plaits by the charcoal weight of shadows, the grizzly brown of the trees and the faint white shimmer of frosty ground, the sun's rays are captures and made solid, if only for a moment.

A small pheasant pokes his head out from between the grain bins--there's lots of corn spilled on the ground, heaping pyramids of it-- and I watch him bob his ringed neck for-ward, for-ward, for-ward into the sunlight. A pause--is he watching for the dog or eyeing the spilled corn?--
and he goes on. The morning is inching forward, creeping over the slopes of the horizon and warming life across the lawn.

All of a sudden a puff of air and moisture slides in front of the sun; these clouds are like cotton candy, spun loosely and in the same hue as a silvery-blue gun. Now the shafts of light draped across the yard have lost their shimmer, and in an instant, a split-second, the grass before me ages into hues of ashen gray. The landscape resembles a nuclear aftermath. Where once grass was crystallized by the the finest frozen drops of illuminated water now there is only a frigid pockmarked wasteland.

The glowing dew of morning has been replaced with the heavy pallor of a gray day, a lifetime of them, so it seems with this ashen color, and now the innocence of young morning reminds me of an old maid.

The rooster has disappeared, taken the gems of his emerald head and ruby-red chest back into the ethers with him. There are only blue jays in the yard now, the occasional red barn finch and... maybe the flit of a canary yellow? I could be dreaming about that one, my hopes for sunlight confusing the actuality of the drab scene outside the window.

What was only moments ago--literally the time it took my to write this out with pen and paper--a promising day has become dismal, a holocaust. So it is, another day in the January of a Nebraska winter.

I continue to peer through the lower panes of the eastern window, hoping to see an amber sheen of sunlight yet again. This gray reminds me of Seattle, but not even the phosphorescence of neon and streetlights is fooled into believing this is its place. I wonder if all people, even those in Seattle, keep on looking out the window, hoping for the faintest trace of color in the sky, throughout the winter. I woke this morning feeling light and airy, and if I give up on that feeling then it will be more than just the land that washes silently into dismal.

Sunrise is an important time day, even Thoreau told us time and again how much he believed in the mornings, and I learn more about how to act from watching the sky than the animals under it. Seems strange, since I myself am one of these animals... I've always believed that I could get through just about anything as long as the sun is shining.