Portents and perplexity

            I love light.  Well, yeah, of course I love light.  But I mean in my yard.  I love the light in my yard.  Especially when there are storm clouds over the mountains, hanging over the north and east, and the sun escapes from a clear west, throwing an almost horizontal brightness over the houses and yards and even the tops of the trees.  The foreground glows warmly while the background is all deep, angry gray.  And most especially when, under these circumstances, a white gull flies against those clouds, low enough to catch that brightness—flashing silver against the dark billows.

            And I love the summer evenings when the yard is deep in shadow, but the sunset flows back up the river so that behind the dark trees, there is a corridor of light.

            The earth in its moods.

            A couple of weeks ago, as I was puttering around in the evening, probably putting dishes in the dishwasher (I know, I know – where is the probable in that?), I looked out the kitchen window and started feeling really weird.  The light was completely wrong.  It was this dullish sort of yellow.  Everywhere.  As though someone had dropped a muffling yellowed gauze over everything.  I yelled at G and went to the door to look out.  I remember reading about this kind of light—something you’d expect just before an earthquake or a tornado.  As if there were smoke in the air, or dust against the sunset.  But there were no fires.  At least, I hadn’t heard of any.  So that left—a portent of something coming at us?  Like the earthquake I mentioned earlier?

            So I went out to try to shoot it.

    

            A minute after I came in, Rachel called, just as edgy as I was.  “Drop everything,” she said. “Go outside.  EVERTHING IS THIS SICKLY YELLOW.”  What did she say about her porch?  Everything on it had gone kind of orange.  Obviously, we don’t see this kind of light very often.

   

            So I tried to record it.  Hard to do. Especially as the light was fading fast.  There was just this cast over everything, as though you were wearing tented glasses.  But if felt like you were breathing something wrong, too—not felt as in breathing in felt wrong, but like it should feel wrong.

   

It’s this that makes me suspect that light does, in fact, have weight.  This and those winter mornings when the sun is just behind the lip of the mountains, and its light pours, honey-like, slowly filling up the valley cup.

We never did find out why the entire world turned yellow for that half hour.  And nothing terrible happened after.  Just the inexorable rolling in of night.  Not even a little storm.  Perplexing.

But then—you need a little mystery in life once in a while, don’t you?