Since it is now ‘officially’ summer, we will perversely jump back to almost the only color to be found in wintertime, holly berries in full fruit against the brilliant green of the leaves and a rich blue sky. I will admit to being quite pleased that we can find skies like this throughout North Carolina winters; having grown up in central New York, the winters there spelled overcast conditions for the majority of the time, which could be very depressing. The few occasions when skies like this appeared, it often spelled a wicked cold front coming through and, instead of being pleasant, it was bitterly cold and windy. The decision to get the fuck out of the state came on one such day, when our water pump had failed and I was in our shack of a wellhouse trying to get it operational again in wind chill conditions down below 0°f. It’s very easy to start asking questions like, “What am I doing here?” in circumstances like that.
Years before, we had taken our first trip to Florida, visiting a water park in February and so on. Flying back, we were above the clouds of course, just as brilliantly sunny as Florida had been most of the time, but on the descent into Syracuse we plunged through the thick cloud deck, getting darker and darker, and emerged over a dim, dismal landscape of dirty snow spread over dead grass among bare trees, remarkably monochromatic – not the most welcome of sights at the end of vacation, and I’m more than a little surprised the pilot didn’t turn around and head right back to Florida. He had the audacity to smile at us as we were deplaning as well.
Anyway, enjoy the color.