Reflections

Driving home on Sunday evening, I saw a cloud sheet off toward the west and wondered how to capture its unique beauty in words. That is the trick to writing, putting a sight or experience into words in a way a stranger can say, I've seen or felt that. Or it made me see or feel something.

In this case, there were qualities that defied convenient description. First, there was the texture of the clouds, The tops rose like thunderheads, but the bottoms were almost melded together. Neither flat and featureless, nor mackereled or scaled as you sometimes see. More like brownie batter poured into a pan right before you pop it into the oven, mostly smooth but with lumps and ridges and rolls.

You probably wonder what is so important about the texture to the cloud bottoms. First, let me describe the tops. As I said, they were towering, backdropped one against the other. They blocked the sun, but only just, so their edges were the blinding white of Florida's summer sun. That transitioned to a silver above then to heavy, rain-laden gray below. Behind them the pastels of sunset were just beginning to color the horizon.

All pretty hum-drum so far. You could go out on a thousand evenings after a thousand Florida summer days, look to the west and see some variant of exactly what I've described. The difference came underneath. What made it stand out, what haunted me into trying to capture it in words for two days, was the color.

I'll start by saying a friend of mine used to be fascinated with lead crystals, the faceted, sometimes elongated orbs you still see. Growing up, he hung them in his window so they would refract the light into hundreds of rainbows that would splash across his bedspread. Most people have seen similar rainbows dancing across a surface in their home, either purposefully as were his, or accidentally from a drinking glass or beveled edge of a window, any glass that catches the light. When most people visualize a rainbow, they see pure colors against the blue of the sky or against some neutral color hanging in the space of their mind's eye.

My friend was a visionary. His bedspread was deep black and satin, engineered to reflect the light as well as provide a unique backdrop for the colors he wished to collect. Black changes a rainbow. You can still pick out each individual stripe that bleeds one into the other, but the colors are deepened, almost tainted. Ruby darkens to wine, orange to rust, yellow to the deepest gold. Having been exposed to that in my impressionable youth prepared me to attempt to describe what I saw.

The bottoms of the clouds were cast in shadow, the silver gray above darkening to a looming charcoal. Splashed across this as if from one broad stroke of a artist's brush was a color it took me several moments to identify. At first I wanted to say it tainted the clouds to a slate green. No perhaps an orange, or was I picking that up from the hints on the horizon. My mind flashed back and forth between the two colors until it finally settled midway between onto gold, as though a mirror were reflecting the sunlight up to the underside of the clouds. In a way, that was exactly what I was seeing. Driving west, we were approaching Boca Ciega Bay, with the intercoastal and the Gulf of Mexico beyond. Being nearly six in the evening, the sun was just low enough to be behind the clouds, lining them a brilliant white and still reflect off the bay to light the underside a muddy gold.

I can sense your impatience. You can see the physics of what I've described but still don't have the payoff. You have pieces of a description from the narrative, but nothing that resonates within your mind, nothing that will anchor the scene into your memory as it did in mine. Let me see what I can nip and tuck and stitch together.

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The western clouds were poured against unseen glass, its surface ancient, rippled and flawed. Jostling against one another, they blockade the sun and crowd the sky for room. Above, they rise as airy pastries, incandescent edges cooling to silver centers as argent rays sunburst around them at increasingly slanted angles. Below, they fade to ash and char, shadowing an unseemly secret behind a veil of gray. Beyond, the match has been set to the evening furnace that will blaze when the descending sun lights the fuel littering the horizon.

An extended grove of stately oaks ring the mirror of the bay, concealing the burnished bronze of a proud and ancient lighthouse since tumbled into the sea. The fallen hand of a broken and sleeping colossus focuses its tarnished light beneath the clouds as if opening a leaden coffer lined with gold and illuminating the covenant of rain concealed within.

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Best I can do on a nervous morning, reflecting on the process as well as the memory as I wait for the next appointment.

© 2007 Edward P. Morgan III