Homeboy at Home During Coronavirus
Coyote Hollow, Thetford Center, VT
6:44 a.m. 41 degrees, wind WNW 3 mph. Sky: solid, mousy gray, an all-night rain prolongs dawn, stalls sunrise, which creeps in obscurity over the eastern rim . . . a drab, dank, dismal morning. Permanent streams: loss of clarity, flow freighted with silt, a hillside revision. Wetlands: reeds dense brown, pines on the far shore a somber green. In between, uninterrupted streaks, a landscape drained of color and joy. One blue jay (commuting to my feeders) calls, flies above the marsh, more gray than blue, dripping. Pond: cold rain on thin ice. I skim a rock: long slide, wake and twang, throbbing ice. Milkweed seeds soggy and plastered, dangle out of the pod . . . limp laundry left on the meadow line.
Blue of a blue jay, an optical illusion. A structural color, a scattering of light. Not a pigment. Transparent, gas-filled spaces (called vacuoles) in the barbs—collectively the vane on either side of the feather shaft—bounce light back at the viewer. The result is a blue festival: indigo blue, madder blue, china blue, porcelain blue, Gobelin blue, Dutch blue, sky blue, baby blue. Take away light, turn off the sun . . . a gray bird. Without light refracting off the vacuoles, nearby melanin cells, a brownish pigment, render the jay (or bluebird or indigo bunting) an uninspired gray. Today's jay: dripping wet, drab as the sky (although more animated). Even its crest . . . an ashen gray. What's not an optical illusion: white cheeks, black wrap-around scarf and eye-liner, barred tail and wings, white-tipped wing feathers. And the gray breast unbroken, like the sharp, strident calls that spill across the marsh.
There are colors we don't see, sounds we don't hear. And then there's the blue jay . . . a chromatic illusion, a Penn and Teller trick. Now blue, now gray, now blue again . . . the nonchalant renderings of our small star.
Ah, the quiet of grey, rainy days. This, by Thomas Merton from DIARY OF A STRANGER:
The rain I am in is not like the rain of cities. It fills the woods with an immense and confused sound. It covers the flat roof of the cabin and its porch with insistent and controlled rhythms. And I listen, because it reminds me again and again that the whole world runs by rhythms I have not yet learned to recognize….
The rain surrounds the whole cabin with its enormous virginal myth, a whole world of meaning, of secrecy, of silence, of rumor. Think of it: all that speech pouring down, selling nothing, judging nobody, drenching the dead leaves, soaking the trees, filling the gullies and crannies of the wood with water, washing out the places where men have stripped the hillside!
What a thing it is to sit absolutely alone in the forest at night, cherished by this wonderful unintelligent perfectly innocent speech, the most comforting speech in the world, the talk that rain makes by itself…. Nobody started it, nobody is going to stop it. It will talk as long as it wants, the rain. As long as it talks, I am going to listen.
An ode to a magical blue...Brilliant!