23 October 2007

The sky as infinite grace*

Every year I forget about geese until I see one symbolic flock, stretched black against the sky, straining southward.

It's been ten years since I first saw this house and drove through this foreign state with a pompous sense of evaluation. The fall was too brown and golden, none of the bloody-fire of a Connecticut River Valley autumn, no sugar maples. Johnny and I surveyed our new back yard and found it wanting: no climbing trees.

Rhode Island: brown and boring.

But we marveled at Rt-102, those hills reaching like ramps into the sky, flanked by forests and straight for miles. We liked the stone roads over Scituate Reservoir.

We didn't spend the fall here, anyways. We went to Cape Cod for the subsequent weeks and walked beaches and took stacks of books out of Falmouth Public Library as we waited for our house to be ready.

Leaves are blowing across the street today, everywhere I go. Towards my office the patched roads and peeling buildings look a little gentler alongside yellow trees and hemmed in by tumbling oak leaves.

And the sky beautifies anything today, marbled blue with high white wisps veining it sparsely. Low fast clouds swell fatly and race along the tree line, having just escaped from nearby smokestacks.

...

*"For rich people, the sky is just an extra, a gift of nature. The poor, on the other hand, can see it as it really is: an infinite grace."
-Albert Camus, Notebooks

4 comments:

Ruth C said...

:)

i like it a lot.
the quote at the end is cool too!

Hope said...

now, I'd love to see your painted description of that,

Anonymous said...

this is such a good thing to read. it makes me stop, and it makes me smile, because i have been enjoying autumn a lot this year. i still am. ;)
you are beautiful, all around.

beijos said...

lets sing together soon