Sequestered, Week 306 (CCCVI)

The morning had an eerie, post-apocalyptic look, leaden skies and a dense haze caused by smoke and ash blowing in from forest fires in Manitoba and Saskatchewan. An orangey red sun rose over the trees, a baleful start to the day.

Beau and I took our usual morning walk, but we didn't go as far as we usually do because of the abysmal air quality. There were ashes in the wind - we could smell them and taste them on the backs of our tongues. Breathing was difficult, and we decided shortening our ramble was a good idea.

As we pottered along, I thought about "after the fall" novels like The Road by Cormac McCarthy, The Postman by David Brin, and a long ago favorite (read in university), Walter Miller's classic A Canticle for Leibowitz. Given what is happening in the great wide world right now, perhaps such musings are not surprising.

It was good to come home. The usual watering and weeding chores were carried out when we returned to our roost, and we are indoors again, probably for the rest of the day. I have a good book and a mug of tea. Beau has his favorite stuffie.

Thursday Poem - The Other Kingdoms

Consider the other kingdoms. The
trees, for example, with their mellow-sounding
titles: oak, aspen, willow.
Or the snow, for which the peoples of the north
have dozens of words to describe its
different arrivals.  Or the creatures, with their
thick fur, their shy and wordless gaze.  Their
infallible sense of what their lives
are meant to be.  Thus the world
grows rich, grows wild, and you too,
grow rich, grow sweetly wild, as you too
were born to be.

Mary Oliver

In the Great Blue Bowl of Morning

She awakens to skies that would make an impressionist painter feel like dancing, to Canada geese singing in unison as they fly up from the river and out into farm fields to feed. This year's progeny sing loudest up there in the great blue bowl of morning. Their pleasure in being alive and aloft mirrors her own as she watches them with a mug of tea, eyes shielded from the rising sun with a sleepy hand.

Below the sweeping strokes of vibrant color painted across the eastern sky are trees, hydro poles, rooflines and village streets, trucks and cars in rumbling motion, early runners in the park, commuters with lunch  bags and briefcases headed downtown to another day at their desks.

On their early walk, she and Beau pause together by a neighbor's fish pond to watch the white and scarlet koi finning their way around in circles, and they notice that the first fallen maple leaves of the season have already drifted into the pool, making eddies and swirls and perfect round spirals on the surface. No need to panic, it's not an early autumn, just the dry heat of August setting the leaf people free to ramble.

If only (she muses to herself) she could actually paint a sky as magnificent as this.  She can't, and the camera will have to do, but what her lens "sees" is absolutely sumptuous, and she is content with the morning's opus.  Sky blue, rose, gold, violet and scarlet lodge in her wandering thoughts, and on the way home, she considers borrowing a potter's wheel, throwing a whole bunch of clay bowls and glazing them in perfect sunrise colors. Emaho!