Liquid sunshine

It's been raining here for a week. There are those who have it much worse, flooding, and power outs. I'm just inconvenienced, and not even seriously. I want to hang my laundry on the clothesline instead of throwing them in the dryer (note my comment yesterday about my Yankee parsimony.) I do love how soft the towels are, though. Conflict again.

About 4 pm, the sun came out. I love the way the sun, low to the horizon, looks at this time of year. High above sun feels wrong to me, perhaps it's a throwback to my northernish European heritage. Long easterly shadows stir something in me that makes me want to watch them until they're gone. Taking pictures through the screen didn't work out well - the auto focus wanted to get the screen, not the fingers of light beyond it. I took out the screen, cranked open the window and captured the first sun we've had in a while. It's still so green. Not spring green, not summer green either. Fall green is brilliant and desperate. The poison ivy and the sumac are the only reds, here. Scarlet bouy lines in an ocean of chloryphyl. The box elders and poplars are yellow, the maples and pears and viburnums are all still green. Odd.

This is certainly my favourite season - spring is exhaustingly hormonal - everything is recreating, reproducing, reemerging. Summer is not the season for mid-life'd fat women. Summer is passion and chaos and heat. Fall is industrious. It's taking stock and putting in order. It's lists and chores and everything in its place. The squirrels know it, the trees know it, and in my bones and my blood I know it too. Winter is sleep. It's dreams of sun on snow and nightmares of ice on the power lines. It's the comfort of a warm bed in November, and the tiny thrill of the first daffodil shoot in April. And then it begins again. I wouldn't have it any other way - you can't savour the good without appreciating the bad. Again with the conflict.