Another one of those chopped up mornings. By the time I sat down to write it was already a bit later in the morning, and I’ve now had to pull down the blackout blind to keep the sun from cooking me alive. And so I sit here once again without a view. It’s too bad – the morning sky, before the sun broke through the cloud-banded horizon layers, was really beautiful, if odd-looking. The clouds looked a bit like exploded clumps of cottage cheese. Not atmospheric, but solid – and very bumpy, lumpy. I guess that has to do with the cold heading this way. Picture a food processor in mid-action.
Then, as I sat down to write (but before I pulled down the blind), when the sun had already risen above those layers (which incidentally have now been puréed into typically cloudy smoothness, without sculptural definition), the sky was filled for blocks with flying seed matter, like spores or dandelion puffs, and as the sun illuminated these wildly gyrating, whirling particles, they looked like small birds, much bigger than they were. The light gave them an ephemeral heft (if that makes sense), a presence I could easily discern, flying and visible as far away as two whole blocks. Only the ones actually flying near my window revealed their true size (less than 1/8 the size of a small bird). The distant ones looked confusingly huge, as the winds, increasingly picking up speed, whipped them round and high, high up into the air, many yards above the rooftops I overlook, mercilessly. They had to dance, sort of like that poor girl in the red shoes. I kept trying to figure out where they came from, and wondered if some trickster had a huge bag of them, open in some backyard hidden from my view.
