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

Morning in Another Light

Sunlight pours through the front window from a crucible of molten copper, as dark and richly thick as tupelo honey spilling across the white linen tablecloth then oozing to the floor, staining the carpet just an instant before it's gone.

As the morning cools to the palest orange sherbet, a faint breeze dusts the walk with a lavender snow from the myrtles finally come into bloom. Above, an aura bees on golden wings flash and dance around each cluster as they delicately sample the bouquet like connoisseurs at a wine tasting.

Sunrise warms to lemon-lime. Jays and cardinals conduct a war of blue and scarlet at the feeder, each side's young fluttering their encouragement as they await the feast that surely follows their parents' victory. Beyond, a lone, red hibiscus stands sentinel against the wall of green, watching from the shadows.

© 2007 Edward P. Morgan III

Flashback

I sit down in the office this morning, half awake, no coffee in my hand, no breakfast on my table. As I gaze out the window without really focusing, a small movement between the blinds draws my eye, flicking like a dandelion seed trapped in the screen catching light then shadow in the slant of sun streaming through the window.

Awakened and intrigued, I force my eyes to focus. The furry mote resolves into a flurry legs delicately lifting warp from weft as if weaving. A tiny, translucent spider spinning a tiny, translucent web in the cells between the screen. Her legs tap and stutter like a teletype desperately ticking out a message that none will ever read. Like my wife's fingers clicking her needles as a blanket emerges from the center of a skein to warm a friend's the newest arrival.

She spins the thinnest, transparent silk like the finest fiber-optics flashing in the sun. Remains of old strands cling to the window like discarded fiberglass, giving it an illusion of age, crafting it a personality that is scratched or cracked or ready to shatter from the pressure of the light. Like a life that has been fractured and painstakingly pieced back together, nearly seamless, without ever falling from its frame. The way I feel some mornings.

Now she waits as I do, her at the center of her web for breakfast to become ensnared, me for the day's central appointment that will tangle me in web of emotions from which I have only recently broken free. Predator and prey, we contemplate each other like black and white circling each other's tail as the sun rises through the trees.

As I finish, the sun glints off my wedding ring, dispelling the flash of melancholy I know will return later in the day as I prepare to face a future woven eight months before.

© 2007 Edward P. Morgan III

Firelight

Firelight - a reading (on YouTube)

We keep the blinds mostly drawn in the dining room at night, just high enough for the cats to sit in the front window and look out. We lower them at dusk just enough to block the streetlight on the corner and the other lights our neighbor's burn throughout the night.

When I awoke this morning, the sun was still low and near the horizon. There was a haze to the east which was lit up in the softest shade of pink, like a rose petal fog that partially obscured the dawn. The sun slanting through the gap in the front window was flame orange, like you only see at dawn or dusk. It struck the legs of our furniture and lit them up as though drawing the fire hidden within the wood. The oak of the barstools glowed like amber beneath a polished finish, the cherry wood in the living room more like garnets. All from a narrow beam of light, maybe a foot high, walking its way from the back of the living room toward the base of the front window as each minute passed.

Ten minutes later, all of it was gone, the haze, the light, the fire. One day soon, it will no longer reappear. Some mornings it pays to rise with the first light of dawn.

© 2011 Edward P. Morgan III

Trash Migration

Trash Migration - a reading (on YouTube)

Here at the house, our trash gets collected twice each week, Monday and Thursday. While we're lucky if we put out one barrel once a week, our neighbors are much more prolific in their trash generation. Every Sunday and Wednesday, we are privileged to witness the rare trash migration that occurs next door.

It starts before dawn with us waking to find one trash can perched like a pillar at the edge of the curb. It stands as a lone sentry for most of the morning, a kind of bellwether guardian to ensure the remainder of the herd will be safe as they approach. One by one over the course of the next several hours, individual cans cluster around their leader until, by evening, three to four well-stuffed barrels have colonized the banks of the asphalt stream. Only then does the young, less contained trash of the herd, the miscellaneous boxes, bags and household detritus, feel safe enough to emerge from hiding and cling to the handles of their elders. Once weekly, they are joined by their low, squat cousins, the recycling bins, always arriving in pairs, usually after a heavy feeding. Some days, they bring snacks of bundled yard waste to see them through the long, dark night until collection the next morning.

Each week, they remain quite cautious. In my twenty years of observation, I've never seen the herd rush the curb en masse. Perhaps the subtropical heat holds them to a slower pace. Perhaps it's their natural shyness or an instinct for self-preservation against the packs of salvage scavengers and rogue recyclers that circle the neighborhood. Perhaps only one or two ever make the migration at all and breed at the curb in some unwitnessed mating ritual or asexual budding. I'm not sure we'll know unless we set up a scent-masked blind with a motion-sensing, night-vision camera to monitor their diurnal rhythms in this their natural habitat.

But we must be quick or by morning all we'll find are their empty carcasses. The grunting, grinding predator that roams the asphalt river is large and its appetite nearly insatiable.

© 2011 Edward P. Morgan III

Squirrel Conclave

Squirrel Conclave - a reading (on YouTube)

Yesterday, as I was looking out the office window, I saw the neighbor's cat go tearing across the front yard, chasing after something out of sight. One of our cats, on the bookshelf behind me, was suddenly very interested. So I went to another window, and sure enough, there was the neighbor's cat with a squirrel in his mouth. I headed for the door, hoping for a rescue, but by the time I got outside, the cat and squirrel were nowhere in sight. I looked around, but saw no sign. Once I got back to the driveway, I heard a squirrel in one of the front oaks screeching a warning like they do, only somewhat off-key. To me, it sounded mournful.

This morning, I look out the office window and see three small squirrels playing in the grass. Tentatively, they chase one another up one of the front oaks. Two more join them. The five of them run down and across the street. Another two cross from the neighbor's yard. Ok, that's seven squirrels. They chase each other up the neighbor's palm tree, and back down, still friendly. Then they sit in a three-by-three foot area, most up on their hind legs as if posing for a picture. Another crosses the street to join them, and, finally, two more. That makes a total of ten squirrels that I can see.

Uh, oh, this doesn't look good. I've never seen this many squirrels in one small space before. Maybe there's some sort of conclave going on. Maybe it's a mass migration. Maybe they think the neighborhood has gone downhill. Or maybe they're plotting revenge against the neighbor's cat. I'd better keep our own off the porch today, just in case.

Now, without ever seeing any squirrels cross back, I've got a normal compliment in the front yard again, eating the hibiscus flowers, drinking from the birdbath, romping in the oaks. All the ones across the street have vanished. One or two more cross, but by then the congregation has dispersed. The conclave is over. Maybe they've selected a new leader. Or elected a new pope. I don't see any white smoke. Just gray tails swishing in the breeze.

Ok, maybe I should go lie down. It's been a rather strange morning.

© 2011 Edward P. Morgan III

Der Panzer Toaster

Der Panzer Toaster - a reading (on YouTube)

On Saturday we went shopping for a new microwave to replace our 21 year-old model which had started to emit more and more of ozone each time we turned it on. While in Bed, Bath & Beyond, I contracted a serious case of techno-lust and felt compelled to check in on an old friend in the small appliance section, Der Panzer Toaster.

I spotted this beast a few years ago. It's a toaster-oven made by Krups, a name reminiscent of the German arms manufacturer during WWII, though an entirely different company as I understand it. This is one serious device. It has solid, German construction, blocky and heavy. It has digital controls, the high-tech communications package of toaster ovens. It has an ultra-modern, matte black, baked on stealth-style enamel coating. Behind the door it has six quartz heating elements, three top, three bottom, that draw more power than the average microwave oven, a whopping 1.6 kW. It has a Teflon coated drip-pan liner. It has enough room inside to swallow a frozen pizza or a house a bevy of Cornish game hens.

If you were to put this machine on treads, it would roam the counter at night and demand the surrender of other kitchen electronics, forcing the small appliances into forming alliances to oppose it. First, it would incorporate the coffee maker into its empire, which the Braun bean grinder would likely betray. Then, the crock pot, the bread machine and the blender would dig in, forming a ceramic, glass and steel Maginot Line. But they, too, would fall when it outflanked their defenses through the forest of oregano and basil in the spice countries. The garbage disposal would resist valiantly but soon shut down, leaving the dishwasher in an untenable position.

Emboldened, Der Panzer Toaster would cross the sink unopposed. One by one, it would conquer the mini-chopper, the hand mixer, and finally the stick blender. With the digital scale and the kitchen timer under siege, only the microwave could hold out on its own for long, and only because it occupies a separate island on a separate circuit breaker. Ultimately, even it would fail unless the refrigerator revoked its neutrality and brought its technological prowess to bear quickly, first by exploiting Der Panzer Toaster's one known weakness and coating the linoleum in a frozen, arctic tundra, followed by opening a second front across the channel to the butcher-block that houses the kitchen knives. Even then, it would be a long, hard slog to liberate the appliances that had fallen under Der Panzer Toaster's shadow. And who knows what cold war might ensue should the conventional oven decide to pursue an independent strategy and occupy its own client states.

As much as I admire that kind of innovative technological initiative, that's not the behavior I'm looking for in a small kitchen appliance. So I left it on the shelf, purring like a Bengal tiger as it dreamed of stainless steel, gourmet glory in someone else's kitchen.

© 2011 Edward P. Morgan III