Solstice writing
Dec. 21st, 2022 11:54 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
radiantfractureAlso from today's session -- a little part-documentary, part-fantasy born of the snowstorm.
* * * * * *
The daytime snow was blue and gold, not white at all, but polarized and luminous. And when night fell, it wasn’t dark. The snow’s trillion tiny mirrors, and the low massed clouds, and the light pollution of course, collaborated to make the street almost as bright as it was in the afternoon, but closer, almost an interior, the inside of a long low tunnel of ice.
Our area has poor street lighting, poles too far apart and too tall, lamps often burnt out, so the night before winter solstice was brighter than any summer night. This made the winter seem like a time not of darkness but of evening things out, a reversion towards the mean.
The city bought those flawed bulbs everyone is talking about, the ones that turn purple as they age. They dyed the street a pale artificial violet. It was beautiful. It made you smell perfume in the cold air, lilac and lavender, scents of spring and late summer.
People trod up and down the gritty ruts in the snowy road, so pleased with the job they’d done shoveling the sidewalk that they didn’t want to walk there. Only a few houses had that bright festive smear of blue or green from thrown-down road salt. You assumed they needed to do it, but you worried about the animals.
Like the yearling deer that came high-stepping delicately among the drifts, swinging her head in perplexity, or the small black dog like a liquid shadow, a little splash of dark water, streaming towards home.
* * * * * *
The daytime snow was blue and gold, not white at all, but polarized and luminous. And when night fell, it wasn’t dark. The snow’s trillion tiny mirrors, and the low massed clouds, and the light pollution of course, collaborated to make the street almost as bright as it was in the afternoon, but closer, almost an interior, the inside of a long low tunnel of ice.
Our area has poor street lighting, poles too far apart and too tall, lamps often burnt out, so the night before winter solstice was brighter than any summer night. This made the winter seem like a time not of darkness but of evening things out, a reversion towards the mean.
The city bought those flawed bulbs everyone is talking about, the ones that turn purple as they age. They dyed the street a pale artificial violet. It was beautiful. It made you smell perfume in the cold air, lilac and lavender, scents of spring and late summer.
People trod up and down the gritty ruts in the snowy road, so pleased with the job they’d done shoveling the sidewalk that they didn’t want to walk there. Only a few houses had that bright festive smear of blue or green from thrown-down road salt. You assumed they needed to do it, but you worried about the animals.
Like the yearling deer that came high-stepping delicately among the drifts, swinging her head in perplexity, or the small black dog like a liquid shadow, a little splash of dark water, streaming towards home.
