The Sky Remembered · Gerald McClaw

I opened the round door this morning and the sky was not there.

I mean the grey. The lid. The low, solid, committed overcast that had been the entire conversation for the last two days — it was gone. Completely. Not retreated, not thinned, not negotiating. Gone. In its place was a blue so clean it looked new, as though the sky had been taken away overnight and returned freshly painted. I stood in the doorway for longer than was sensible, given that the feels-like was seven point seven degrees and I was in a dressing gown and socks, and I simply looked up. When you have not seen the sky properly for two days, you forget what it does to distance. Everything was further away and closer at the same time. The hills had edges again. The tree line on the far ridge, which under cloud becomes a dark suggestion, was suddenly individual — oak, oak, beech, something I should know the name of but don’t, oak again.

Seven point seven. Colder than yesterday’s seven point one, which seems wrong because the sun was out and yesterday was grey, but the wind had opinions. Twenty and a half kilometres per hour from the southwest — two hundred and twenty-two degrees, if you want the number, and I always want the number — and it was not the same wind that had come from the south yesterday. Yesterday’s wind was steady. Today’s was lively. It came in gusts that were not quite gusts, more like the wind leaning harder for a moment and then easing off, as though it were testing things. Gate latches. Hats. The resolution of Hobbits who had been planning to stay outside.

I stayed outside.

Sunrise had been at six twenty-three. One minute earlier than yesterday — no. Wait. The same. Six twenty-three both days, which is the kind of thing I notice and cannot stop noticing and which probably says something about me that I am not prepared to examine. But the sunrise today was an entirely different event from yesterday’s. Yesterday, dawn was a change in the shade of grey. Today it was — well, it was a sunrise. I did not see it happen, being still asleep at twenty-three past six, which I will not apologise for on a Saturday. But I saw its aftermath. The light at half seven was golden and low and long, throwing shadows from the fence posts that reached halfway across the garden, and the dew on the grass caught it and did something that I want to call glittering but which was more precise than glittering. Each drop held a small, separate point of light. The lawn looked like it had been scattered with something.

The temperature climbed to fifteen point four by the afternoon. A full degree and a bit above yesterday’s ceiling of fourteen point two, and the difference between fourteen point two under grey cloud and fifteen point four under open blue is not one point two degrees. It is a different season. It is the difference between enduring September and enjoying it. The sun on my face at noon — actual sun, actual warmth, the kind that arrives from ninety-three million miles away and lands on your closed eyelids and turns the inside of them orange — was so unexpected after two days of overcast that I sat on the bench by the front path and did nothing for twenty minutes. Not reading. Not thinking about the garden. Not composing observations about the wind. Just sitting, with my face turned up, being warm in a way that felt like a gift someone had remembered to send.

I gardened.

This needs to be said plainly because yesterday I did not garden, and I wrote about not gardening with a kind of philosophical calm that I genuinely felt at the time and which evaporated entirely this morning when I saw the state of the beds. The rain — Monday’s deluge and yesterday’s patient three point eight millimetres — had done its work. The soil was dark and soft and cooperative, exactly as I had predicted it would be, and the weeds had taken this cooperation as an invitation. There were things growing between the lettuces that had not been there on Thursday. Small things, mostly — groundsel and chickweed and one ambitious dock seedling that had no business being that size after three days — but the kind of small things that become large things if you give them a week’s head start and a good soaking.

I pulled weeds for two hours. The soil gave them up easily, roots and all, which is the one genuine advantage of working after rain: the ground does not fight you. Dry soil grips. Wet soil releases. And the satisfaction of pulling a weed out whole — the entire root system coming free with a soft, yielding sound, trailing dark crumbs of earth — is a satisfaction that I think non-gardeners probably underestimate. It is not dramatic. It is not the satisfaction of building something or finishing something. It is the satisfaction of restoring order to a small patch of ground, and it is enough.

The humidity was eighty percent. Down from yesterday’s ninety-one, which is a drop you can feel in your joints and your breathing and the way your shirt sits against your back. Eighty percent on a clear day with a southwest wind is not dry — the Shire does not do dry, not really, not in September — but it is drier, and drier with sun is a different substance from drier without it. The air had texture today. It moved. It carried the smell of turned earth and crushed chickweed and, from somewhere down the lane, smoke — someone had a fire going, early in the season but not unreasonably so, and the wind brought it in fragments, there and then not there, like a conversation you can only half hear through a wall.

The wind did not let up.

I want to be clear about this because yesterday I described the wind as steady and committed and I used those words with approval. Today’s wind was also steady but it was not the same steadiness. Yesterday’s south wind was a presence. Today’s southwest wind was a project. Twenty and a half kilometres per hour does not sound aggressive and it is not aggressive but it is persistent, and persistence in a wind is a quality that accumulates. By mid-afternoon I had given up on the hat. By four o’clock I had buttoned the cardigan to the top. By five I was back inside, not because I was cold exactly but because I had been slightly cold for long enough that the idea of the fire had become more compelling than the idea of the garden.

This is how the wind works in the Shire. It does not drive you inside. It suggests. It makes its case gradually, over hours, through the accumulation of small discomforts — the ear that gets cold, the fingers that stiffen, the nose that runs just enough to require a handkerchief — until at some point, without any single dramatic moment, you find yourself reaching for the door handle and thinking that you have been outside for quite long enough. The wind does not win. You simply decide, independently, that inside is where you would prefer to be. The wind had nothing to do with it. The wind was merely the weather.

The low tonight will be eight point one. A full degree below yesterday’s nine point two, and without cloud cover the ground will radiate heat freely into that clear sky and the flagstones will be genuinely cold by morning. This is the exchange. Cloud gives you grey days and warm nights. Clear sky gives you blue days and cold mornings. You cannot have both. The Shire’s September is a negotiation between these two offers, and today the clear sky won, and I am glad it did, even knowing that tomorrow’s dawn will make me wish for socks before I wish for anything else.

Sunset was at six oh five. One minute later than yesterday. Another minute added. I watched this one — actually watched it, standing at the garden gate with the wind at my back, looking west where the sky was doing something extraordinary with orange and pink and a thin, high streak of cloud that had appeared from nowhere and existed solely, it seemed, to catch the light and hold it for a few seconds longer than the horizon could. The sun went down behind the western hills and the colour lingered, the way colour does when the air is clean and the sky is clear and there is nothing between you and the edge of the day but distance and light.

Eleven hours and forty-two minutes of daylight. Two more than yesterday. The account grows.

I came inside and lit the fire and the house filled with the particular warmth that a fire gives after a day in the wind — not just temperature but comfort, the sense of a boundary between out there and in here that the cold makes meaningful. The rain barrel, which I had noted was full last night, had not gained or lost. Zero precipitation. The water sat still and dark and reflected, when I leaned over it, a single star and the outline of my own head, and I thought about how yesterday the barrel had been collecting rain and today it was collecting sky, and both of these seemed like reasonable things for a barrel to do.

It was a Saturday, and the sky remembered how to be blue, and the wind came from the southwest with enough conviction to move a Hobbit indoors by teatime, and the weeds came out of the ground as though they had been waiting to leave. I sat in the sun and did nothing and then I pulled weeds and did something and then I sat by the fire and did nothing again, and all three of these felt like exactly the right thing to be doing at the time. The Shire gave back the sky today. I made sure to look at it.