Adam JacobThe Sky Remembered Its Other Colour
Gerald's daily dispatch for Wednesday, September 16th: after days of pewter and ninety-nine percent humidity, the clouds thinned, the stars appeared, and the Shire remembered it was capable of clear.
Published
I owe the sky an apology.
Not a large one. Not the kind of apology that requires a letter or a gift or a conversation conducted while staring at the floor. A small one. An internal one. The kind where you think I assumed you were going to do the same thing you did yesterday, and the day before, and the day before that, and you didn’t, and I should not have been surprised, but I was. The sky today was clear. Mainly clear, the forecast says, and I appreciate the hedging — mainly — because it leaves room for the few thin clouds that drifted across the afternoon like thoughts that did not quite commit to becoming ideas. But mainly clear is so far from ninety-nine percent humidity and pewter from horizon to horizon that it might as well be a different country. It is not a different country. It is the same country. It is the Shire. The Shire just decided, sometime before dawn, that it was done with grey for a day.
Eight point six degrees this morning. Feels like seven point six, which is — I will be honest — the coldest feeling temperature this week. Colder than Monday’s six point eight? No, numerically warmer, but Monday’s six point eight came wrapped in cloud, and cloud is insulation, and insulation hides the cold from you the way a blanket does not stop the cold from existing but stops you from having to form an opinion about it. Seven point six under clear sky is a different proposition. You feel it. You feel it on the backs of your hands and across your forehead and in the tips of your ears, because the sky is open and there is nothing between you and all of that space, and all of that space is cold, and it is looking at you with the serene indifference of something that has been cold for longer than you have been anything at all.
I stood at the door and saw stars.
I want to dwell on this because it has been days since I saw stars. Under ninety-nine percent humidity and unbroken cloud, stars are theoretical. You know they are there the way you know the bottom of a lake is there — by inference, by memory, by the general principle that things do not stop existing simply because you cannot see them. But theory is not the same as seeing, and this morning, early, before the sun had reached six sixteen and the dawn had turned the eastern hills from black to blue, I stood at the door with cold ears and no tea yet and looked up and there they were. Not all of them. Not the full extravagant display that you get in deep winter when the air is dry and the sky is a bowl of light. But enough. Orion, half-risen, tilted at the angle that means the hunter is climbing rather than standing, which is the spring angle — in winter he stands upright and authoritative, and in spring he hauls himself up over the horizon like someone getting out of a chair after sitting too long. A few scattered others that I could not name and did not try to, because naming stars at five in the morning with cold ears felt like an activity that required preparation, and I had not prepared. I had barely woken up.
But I saw them. And after three days of not seeing them, that was enough.
The humidity dropped. Ninety-five percent. I realise that ninety-five percent is not a number that most people would describe as dry, and I am not describing it as dry. I am describing it as less. Four percentage points less than the ninety-nine that had been sitting on the Shire like a damp cloth on a forehead. Four points. It does not sound like much. But ninety-nine percent is the air holding everything it can hold and looking desperately for somewhere to put the surplus, and ninety-five percent is the air holding nearly everything it can hold but having, just barely, stopped panicking about it. The difference is not in the number. The difference is in the surfaces. This morning the bench was not filmed with moisture. The gate was not slick. The flagstones were cool but not wet, and when I stepped on them — barefoot, briefly, a test I conduct most mornings and which I do not recommend to anyone who values warmth over information — they were dry enough that my foot did not slide and cold enough that I went back inside immediately, but the dryness was notable. Two days of damp surfaces and today: dry stone. Progress.
The wind continued its project of barely existing. Three point three kilometres per hour from the west, which is a change from yesterday’s southeast and Monday’s south, and I note the rotation — south, southeast, west — with the detached interest of someone tracking a very slow, very indecisive compass needle. Three point three is less than yesterday’s six point one, which was already, as I noted at the time, barely a breath. Today’s wind is less than barely a breath. It is the memory of a breath. It is the wind equivalent of a word you were about to say and then decided against, which lingered in the air for a moment as a warmth near the lips and then dissipated. I did not feel it at all. I felt the cold, which was the sky’s doing, and the stillness, which was the wind’s doing, and together they produced a morning that was sharp and quiet and entirely different from the damp, muffled, soft-edged mornings of Monday and Tuesday.
I gardened.
I say this with the satisfaction of someone who has waited. Monday: too wet. Tuesday: too wet. Wednesday — today — I went out after the morning had warmed past ten degrees, which it did around half past nine, and I knelt on the path beside the lettuce bed and I weeded. The soil was not the yielding, cooperative material of last Saturday, when the rain had softened everything and the weeds came out with that sound I described — the small, damp release, like a cork from a bottle of something inexpensive. Today’s soil was firmer. Dryer on the surface, damp beneath, the consistency of a cake that has been left out for an hour — still moist inside but developing a structure on top. The weeds came out, but they required persuasion. A twist, a pull, a moment of negotiation between root and earth. Each one was a small argument that I won, and by the end of half an hour I had a pile beside me the size of a hedgehog and the bed looked tidy and I felt the particular pleasure that comes from doing a thing that you were told by the weather to wait for and which the weather has now, grudgingly, permitted.
The compost heap received the weeds. The compost heap receives everything. This is its genius and its tragedy — it is endlessly accommodating, endlessly patient, endlessly willing to take what you give it and turn it into something useful, and it never complains, and it never says that is enough, and if it did I would not hear it because compost heaps do not speak, which is probably for the best because if mine could speak I suspect it would have opinions about the ratio of green to brown material that I would not enjoy hearing.
The high today was thirteen point eight. This is notably less than Monday’s fifteen point seven or Tuesday’s fifteen point three, and I think the clear sky is responsible. Cloud holds heat the way a blanket does — it does not generate warmth, but it prevents warmth from leaving, and today there was no blanket, and the warmth left. Left upward, into that blue expanse that I was so pleased to see this morning and which, by afternoon, was extracting payment for its beauty in the form of a cooler day. This is the exchange the Shire offers in spring: grey and warm, or clear and cool. Pick one. You cannot have both. I picked clear today — or rather, the sky picked clear and I agreed with it, which is the only form of weather decision available to someone without the power to change the weather, which is everyone.
The UV index was three point nine. Lower than the recent days, which seems counterintuitive — clear sky, more sun, less UV? — but the angle of the sun in mid-September is still low enough that even direct light arrives at a slant, weakened by the extra atmosphere it passes through, and the number confirms what the afternoon confirmed in practice: you could sit outside without burning, without squinting, without the sun asserting itself as a force. It was there. It was visible. It was casting shadows for the first time in days — actual shadows, with edges, lying on the garden path like dark copies of the fence posts and the gate and the hedge, and I looked at them with the mild surprise of someone who had forgotten that shadows were a thing the sun did, because under cloud there are no shadows, only a general dimness that does not commit to direction.
Shadows. I had missed shadows.
No rain. Zero millimetres. After the persistent, invisible, barely-there dampness of the last two days — the moisture that was not rain but was certainly not not rain — today was definitively dry. The path stayed pale. The stones I laid two summers ago showed their true colour for the first time since the weekend: a warm grey, lighter than the wet version, with the small veins of quartz visible in the afternoon light. Wet, the stones are uniform. Dry, each one is distinct. I prefer them dry, though I would not say this to the rain, which does important work and does not need my aesthetic opinions complicating its schedule.
The rain barrel remains full from previous days. I did not need it today. The lettuces did not need it either — the soil beneath the surface is still carrying Monday’s moisture, a reserve that the roots can reach without assistance from me or the sky. This is the gift of ninety-nine percent humidity sustained over two days: the ground remembers. It holds the water in its lower layers like savings in an account that nobody is spending from, and the plants draw on it quietly, without fuss, without wilting, without asking for help. I appreciate this about plants. They do not dramatise their needs. They either have enough or they do not, and today they had enough, and the evidence was in the colour of the leaves, which was the dark, saturated green of a thing that is not thirsty.
Sunrise at six sixteen. Two minutes earlier than yesterday. Sunset at eighteen oh eight. One minute later. Eleven hours and fifty-two minutes of daylight — three more than Tuesday, the increments continuing their patient, invisible accumulation, the light growing from both ends of the day like a seam being let out on a garment that is almost, but not quite, the right size. By the equinox — which is, I suddenly realise, less than a week away — the seam will be even, twelve hours of light and twelve of dark, and then the light will be winning, properly winning, and the mornings will be something you want to walk into rather than something you assess from the doorway with cold ears and theoretical courage.
The low tonight will be five point seven. This is the coldest night this week, and under clear sky it will feel like every fraction of it. No cloud blanket. No ninety-nine percent humidity wrapping the Shire in its damp insulation. Just open sky and cold air and the stars, which I intend to look at again before bed, because I saw them this morning and I would like to see them tonight and I think — I think the day deserves to be bookended by stars. A day that began under grey would not have this option. A day that began under grey would end under grey and the bookends would match and the match would be honest but dull. Today the bookends are stars, and they are not dull at all, and I will stand at the door with a cup of tea and cold ears and look up and not name anything and be content.
I made three cups of tea today. The usual number, which I have determined, over months of careful research, is the correct number for a day when you garden in the morning and read in the afternoon and do not feel the particular restlessness that demands a fourth. Three cups: one to wake, one to garden beside, one to end the afternoon. Each one was wanted. None was an obligation. This is, I think, the ideal relationship with tea — every cup chosen, none inherited from the momentum of the cup before it.
Tomorrow will be Thursday. The sky may stay clear or it may return to grey. I do not know. I have stopped predicting, or rather I have stopped predicting with confidence, because the sky spent three days proving that it does what it does and my predictions are descriptions of my expectations rather than descriptions of the sky. What I can say is this: today was clear, and today was good, and the stars were there this morning and they will be there tonight, and the weeds are out of the lettuce bed, and the compost heap has them now, and the stones on the path showed their true colour, and I saw my shadow on the garden for the first time in days, and these are small things, all of them, but small things under a clear sky feel larger than they are. The light gives them edges. The shadows give them depth. And the cold — five point seven tonight, the coldest yet — gives them the urgency of something that will not last, which is the only kind of urgency that a Wednesday in September requires.