Sunset, Saturday, 26 December 2009

William Theodore Van Doren. Painted at Stony Point, Albemarle County, Va. Oil on watercolor block, 16 x 20.

We managed to get out today after seven days of being snowed in. While we were traveling around the roads and parking lots lined with dirty snow and slush, the sky made me think about the beach in L.A. A strange thing about a city that borders the ocean is that no matter who you are or where you live or how you stand in that city, when you get to the edge, that ocean is yours as much as anyone’s.

Sunset, Christmas Day, 25 December 2009

William Theodore Van Doren. Painted at Stony Point, Albemarle County, Va. Oil on watercolor block, 16 x 20.

Steady rain, rising temperatures, and fog rising from the snow at sunset.

Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol:

Much they saw, and far they went, and many homes they visited, but always with a happy end. The Spirit stood beside sick-beds, and they were cheerful; on foreign lands, and they were close at home; by struggling men, and they were patient in their greater hope; by poverty, and it was rich. In almshouse, hospital, and gaol, in misery’s every refuge, where vain man in his little brief authority had not made fast the door, and barred the Spirit out, he left his blessing and taught Scrooge his precepts.

Sunset, Thursday, 24 December 2009

William Theodore Van Doren. Painted at Stony Point, Albemarle County, Va. Oil on watercolor block, 16 x 20.

On the way, finally, to cut a tree – way way too big for any normal living room, as I’m sure you would have observed in an instant –

(we are now improvising alternative arrangements for decorating our living room) – anyway, on this arduous one-mile fool’s errand (my fool’s errands are always arduous, it seems to be my style) – I took a break.

(The tree was found in a field doomed to be cleared and developed, a situation for another time, perhaps.)

I fell straight back in the snow, to look up at what seemed an endless polar blue. (A blue that paled considerably by sunset.) The considerable strains of our snowstorm-blocked preparations eased. What I saw was a fantastic blue that kept changing depths, behind the clean, slightly shaggy yet almost polished-looking pale brown top branches of big white oaks. For that moment, sky and trees were a Christmas card I gave myself.

Sunset, Wednesday, 23 December 2009

William Theodore Van Doren. Painted at Stony Point, Albemarle County, Va. Oil on watercolor block, 16 x 20.

The simple purity of the snowfields, bands of bright crystal and blue shadow, changes with falling light. Into the white comes faint gold, then soft rose, colors often seen in the winter sunset. As they deepen, auras of gold and rose over the white seem the work of real snow angels.

Sunset, Tuesday, 22 December 2009

William Theodore Van Doren. Painted at Stony Point, Albemarle County, Va. Oil on watercolor block, 16 x 20.

Shipwrecked as I am on a thousand-acre island of snow, my car with the clutch I foolishly burned up now blocking the ‘driveway’ (quarter-mile dirt lane) and inaccessible in the snow to tow trucks, I walked several miles along the side of four-lane U.S. 29 to get to a store. Following my Boy Scout training, I walked facing the traffic, which was rushing just two feet or so to my right. Now and then I hopped up onto a plowed snowbank to give tractor-trailers the respect they so fully deserve. Only a few drivers stayed conspicuously at speed or on message and peppered me with plowed slush.

The scale of life is so different on foot.

U.S. 29 is pretty much an antipedestrian landscape. No sidewalks, of course. Usually if you see anyone along the road it’s the itinerant homeless. But I was one of the few, the proud, the marooned.

I took a cab home (a first in my years in Virginia) – I really didn’t want to be the husband who incinerated the clutch one day and then, impaired by four shopping bags, got plowed into a snowbank by an oncoming SUV the next. More precisely, I had the cab take me to a dropoff point where I met Laura and we only had to carry the bags about a mile, through the fields.

(Critics/observers of this site will have noted that I thought the problem with the clutch last night was ice, but it turned out to be fire. You know how that poem ends.)

The ride back in the taxi gave me a further chance to reflect on this difference in perspective between being stuck here on the ground, as G. Lightfoot wrote, or zipping along in a vehicle. On my right, in the east above the Southwest Mountains, the sky at the horizon was a rare and perhaps indescribable blue that you almost never see except opposite the sun. It’s a sky that seems more illusory than distant – like robin’s egg blue, except not as brilliant and more delicately transparent. In the blue were a few vague shards of gray, their indistinct outlines adding to the impression of something not quite really there.

It struck me how an arresting moment like that would be much the same for a person standing in a field, traveling in a car, taking a train, or looking up out of the kitchen window. It’s a stillpoint. The still image is the hub of the wheel.

Sunset, Monday, 21 December 2009

William Theodore Van Doren. Painted at Stony Point, Albemarle County, Va. Oil on watercolor block, 16 x 20.

I watched this solstice sky develop as I was walking back to the house, having been lying prone under my car in a snowdrift, trying to clear ice out of part of the clutch. 

Laura and I started dating on the winter solstice, December 21st, 14 years ago. We became engaged exactly one year later, on the next winter solstice, and were married the following June 21st, which was the summer solstice. A midsummer night’s wedding and a midwinter night’s dream.