Song of the skies

‘Music expresses that which cannot be said and on which it is impossible to be silent’: It’s this time of year where I find the light, as it moves toward the end of day, embellishes the most dramatic of skies. With the sun skimming the horizon, the brightness hits broadside at every shape and standing object, creating contrasts of vivid colours that lean against long shadows; the shadows themselves like an echo that stretches beyond in more ways than previous. Then again, it could be the winds of November that are accountable for casting shades of grey over fields and crevices of land as all readies for winter’s rest.

Its only at this time of year where visible in the transition from day to night and when the air is calm are pods of milkweed that drift silently to pollinate for the sake of the lives of butterflies and their kind.

It happened to be the voice of Pavarotti that filled the speakers of my car’s sound system the other day that reminded me that it could only be music that could speak to what I was taking in all around. The skies and landscape were at once the perfect stage setting for opera, whether I understood the words or not. I felt the melancholy of the human voice as it found that emotion hidden in the silhouettes, but then as the music rose so did the sun punch through the grey, expressing its reign over earth and sky. Besides the high music of opera are the grounded songs of a country ballad as in the early morning the landscape carries the playing of a steel guitar that gives flight to the geese as they charge from the corn fields.

Rural areas benefit from open horizons that in themselves have calming effect, but also having cinematic, widescreen images literally opens the curtain to an immensity that one struggles with words to express; where the nuances and spectrum of light are but impossible to paint, and even when the drama of sundown is caught in a photo image it has already lost the impact that only being in the moment can truly impart. I slow down for an oncoming tractor pulling two wagons loaded with tonnage of rounded bales, next a jack rabbit springs across my path; a sparrow hawk is highlighted as it waits in tall branches of a nearby tree while surveying the newly shorn fields for its evening meal.

In the direction I am headed the clouds are gathering in a swirl of tide and will mix with lake currents of Presquille Bay until the sun finally lands on the lake and in a continuous glow will gently blend into twilight until hours will pass and it will be restarted again over to the east, resurfacing again at dawn in the Adolphus Reach, where also I have stood and watched the early crossings of the ferry from on high over Glenora as the sound of the cello spanned the air.