western watershed romance |
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A blushing, overcast sky rolls over this dawn -
soft, concealing, clothing the world to intimacy. It feels like inland
San Diego County dawns in the one year I lived there in my youth, when
the coastal fog permeated the little shit town where I lived,
protecting my weak, battered, confused soul from leering onlookers
while I plied the water for bass and sunfish in the little reservoir
that fed our faucets. This overcast, this low glow of dawn, it creates
a copse, a cozy little theater where vulnerability and desire can flow
out and be free. The irony is that this dawn's sky isn't the result of
some foggy bank rolling in from a nearby coast, but it's born of smoke,
of blazing fires consuming the Cache Creek Watershed, wafting over what
had been an oven-baked summertime Central Valley town. But the effect
is the same, whispering some substance of an idea, such as more than
one route exists to a given state, an environment.
The blush bloodies as the sun and fire rise, it creeps in, slides in, slithers in, fooling me that it's autumn. The smoothing light blunts the searing edge of the sun's summery heat, it carpets the sky with a pastel watercolor landscape that intimates intimacy and introspection and the quiet time, the preparation for death, both temporary and permanent, it teases out and toys with those autumnal feelings that collect and reflect and prepare and bask for one last loving gasp before the wilted winter sun hangs low and slow and cold in the southern sky. The sere hills brushed tangerine by the bloody sky, and an eerie dearth of summer's pugnacious southerly winds, they, too, they fool, they imitate. But I wonder if it really is imitation and not instead an irruption of that most gilded of seasons, an ephemeral jewel of time, beckoning to bathe in its startling contrast to the scimitar summertime within which it finds expression. I can't not embrace it.