Essays
Scattering: the process by which light looks pale or white on the horizon.
“But peace abhorreth artificial joys”
From the II Canto, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage
-Lord Byron
The earth rolls out from the road above my house and all along the roads everywhere in pillows of green. All this green and the sun like we have now, some days we cannot be sure what is real.
It has been a strange spring this year. Strange, I think, for its melancholy. For most of my life I have lived in places where spring arrives as the spring we anticipate. There are flowers. The trees bloom. The grass greens up and starts to smell sweet again. There are pockets of warm, fresh air that beg us to stop. So we do. We stop and we see spring is here. We are free of winter. We are relieved. And yet there is a melancholy that comes with the season. I notice its presence more this year. I cannot recall hearing anyone speak about it, at least not this year. Rather, I find it in songs. “Spring Can Really Hang You Up the Most” is a tune that sits close this time of year. This jazz standard is one I love, and a favorite verse goes:
At some point in the cold beginnings of the new year, we in the districts enter a kind of rhythm with our days. Part of this is caused by our anticipation of the sun’s return. The temperatures tend to get colder. More snow falls. All the while, the sun swells closer and closer to the horizon. The sky changes, and we can see, if we look, a fresh palette of pastels filling our view of the world. Clouds turn the same golden color of sunlit wheat. The sky itself will turn the color of salmon flesh. Colors pass over the mountains and tint the sea and gift us with a light that we have not seen for some weeks. On the horizon there are distinct layers of pinks, blues, violets, all in pastel. Eventually, the sun returns. I saw it return on the morning of January 20th.