Gellid

One good thing about this winter course I'm teaching is that it requires me to get up at about the same time that the sun rises. The lightening of the sky slowly wakes me up, and when I'm eating breakfast there's a shining glow to the east, a brightening of color that turns the wings of the feeding cardinals into incandescent glory. The birds outside were many and lively; the usual sparrow-cardinal-chickadee flock was augmented by visitations by a trio of mourning doves, a sextet of hormonal starlings, and a single yellow-shafted Northern flicker (which hung upside-down from the budding silver maple, pecking holes into the thin new branches).

Walking to campus was cold, but not in a miserable way, the way it can be when the "cold" is entirely due to the blasting of chilly winds. This was more in the nature of sink-into-your-bones cold, a kind of cold that is thick and quiet and still. The cold air pressed against the fronts of my thighs through my jeans, turning them and the skin on my face into cool waxiness, a strange stiff chilliness that is nothing like the knife-like pain of freezing winds scraping at my earlobes and corners of my eyes. The sky was grey and likewise still, a sort of brooding dimness that somehow did not speak of rain, or sleet, or even snow -- just an overhanging weight of thermally compressed air.

The sky was chill and still, the light pellucid -- all the energy and warmth of the day was contained in that initial burst of red-gold light, the chattering feeding birds, and the liveliness of my students on the next-to-last day of class.

Comments

[KathyR]

You are making me cold. People in L.A. are not supposed to be cold.

Very evocative.

[Rana]

*laughs*

I figure I need to share my pain. ;)

[Jane Dark]

Lovely. I don't mind the cold.

[Phantom Scribbler]

Beautiful, Rana.

[timna]

Class is almost over!
went by quickly for me.

[Rana]

Whoo!