Adam JacobThe Sky Remembered How to Be Empty
Gerald's daily dispatch for Saturday, September 19th: the rain departs overnight without ceremony, the Shire wakes to clear sky and cool air, and Gerald rediscovers his garden path, his stones, and the particular pleasure of a Saturday that asks nothing of you.
Published
I woke up and the rain had gone.
Not tapered off, not thinned to a polite drizzle, not faded gradually into that ambiguous state where you cannot quite tell whether it is raining or whether the air is simply remembering rain. Gone. Entirely. The sky had cleared overnight with the decisiveness of someone who has been making a mess in the kitchen and then tidied the whole thing before you came downstairs, so that by the time you arrive there is nothing left but clean surfaces and the faint, damp smell of effort.
I stood at the window for a moment, blinking, because after a week in which the sky had been various shades of full — cloudy, overcast, grey, actively raining, emphatically raining — the emptiness of a clear sky was almost startling. Not blue in the theatrical, postcard way that summer manages. Pale. September blue. The blue of early spring in the Shire, which is a colour that does not shout but which fills an extraordinary amount of space, and I had forgotten how much space a sky has when there is nothing in it. Yesterday’s clouds had made the sky feel close, low, furnished. Today the sky was a room with all the furniture removed, and it was enormous.
Clear sky. I keep saying it to myself because the weather this week has made clarity feel like an event rather than a default. Monday was overcast. Tuesday was overcast. Wednesday briefly cleared and I was so startled I wrote about the stones. Thursday brought cloud back. Friday brought eight point one millimetres of rain and a wind that leaned against the hill. And now Saturday — clear. As if the week had been building toward a punchline and this was it: after all that fuss, here is the sky, and it was here the whole time, behind everything, waiting.
Ten degrees at the thermometer this morning. Feels like eight point one, which is the coolest the air has felt all week, and the reason is obvious: there is no blanket. Yesterday’s rain and cloud held the warmth in — the low last night was the warmest of the week because the sky was wrapped tight and nothing could escape upward. Tonight’s low will be eight point three, and the difference is the difference between sleeping under a duvet and sleeping under a single sheet. The cloud is gone, and the heat is leaving, rising into that enormous empty sky with the unhurried certainty of something that knows it is no longer being detained.
I do not mind. Eight point one on a clear Saturday morning in September is not cold. It is bracing, which is a word I have always liked because it implies that the temperature is doing something useful — it is bracing you, preparing you, tightening the air around you in a way that makes the first cup of tea feel less like a habit and more like a rescue. The kettle went on before I had finished looking at the sky. The first cup was consumed standing by the open door, which is a thing I have not done all week because standing by an open door in the rain is not contemplation, it is just getting wet for philosophical reasons.
The air smelled different. I want to be precise about this because smell is the thing that tells you a day has changed before the numbers do. Yesterday the air smelled of rain and soil and the particular green dampness that eight point one millimetres produces when it falls on a garden that was already damp. Today the air smelled of — I want to say nothing, but that is not right. It smelled of distance. The kind of smell you get when the wind has come a long way and dropped everything it was carrying along the route, arriving clean and light and slightly cool, carrying only the faintest suggestion of the hills to the southwest, which is where the wind was coming from today, at nine point eight kilometres per hour, gently, without the leaningness that yesterday’s east-southeast had.
Southwest. The wind has rotated almost completely around the compass this week. South on Monday, southeast on Tuesday, west on Wednesday, north on Thursday, east-southeast on Friday, and now southwest on Saturday. It is as though the wind has been conducting a slow survey of the Shire from every angle, tasting the hedges and the fields and the chimneys from each direction in turn, and has now arrived at the southwest and found it satisfactory. I approve. The southwest wind is the gentlest wind in the Shire — it comes over the rolling country and loses its sharpness on the hills, arriving here with the soft, rounded quality of something that has been rubbed smooth by travel. Nine point eight. Not pushy. Not absent. Present in the way that a good companion is present: there if you notice, unobtrusive if you do not.
I went outside.
This seems like a small thing to write, but after Friday’s rain, in which I explicitly and without apology stayed indoors and drank four cups of tea, going outside felt like a declaration. Not a grand one. Not a speech-from-the-steps, flag-in-the-breeze declaration. More the quiet kind: the door opens, the foot goes out, the air meets the skin, and the body says yes, this is correct, this is where we should be.
The stones were wet. Of course they were — eight point one millimetres does not dry overnight, and the humidity is still eighty-nine percent, which means the air itself is not particularly interested in helping things dry. But they were differently wet. On Wednesday, when the sky briefly cleared, I wrote about the stones being dry and how I preferred them that way — their individual character visible, the quartz veins catching light. Yesterday I wrote about them being uniformly grey under the rain, hiding their character beneath identical wet coats. Today they were something in between: damp, glistening slightly where the early sun caught them, but beginning — just beginning — to show their edges again. The quartz was not quite visible but it was suggested, the way a word is suggested when someone starts to say it and then pauses. Give them an hour or two of this clear sky and they will be themselves again. I found that encouraging in a way that probably says more about me than about the stones.
The garden was magnificent. Not in the showy way — nothing has burst into bloom overnight, no sudden riots of colour — but in the heavy, saturated, deeply alive way that a garden looks when it has been properly watered and then given sunlight. Everything was fat with moisture. The soil was dark. The leaves were glossy. The crocuses, which have been quietly progressing all week without much commentary from me, were open, which I think is the first time I have seen them fully open this spring, and they were open in the particular wide, unguarded way that flowers open when there is sun and no wind strong enough to make them cautious.
I stood in the garden and did nothing useful for about fifteen minutes. This was, I think, the most important thing I did all day.
Humidity eighty-nine percent. Still high. Still the Shire in September, still the air holding more water than it strictly needs to, still the kind of atmosphere that makes you aware of your own skin in a way that drier air does not. But eighty-nine under a clear sky feels entirely different from ninety-five under rain. It is the difference between a room that is warm because the heating is on and a room that is warm because it is full of people — the same temperature, perhaps, but an entirely different quality of warmth. Today the humidity felt like potential. Yesterday it felt like fact. Today the dampness was something the sun might address. Yesterday the dampness was something the rain was actively producing.
Precipitation: nought point one millimetres. I nearly laughed when I saw the number. After yesterday’s eight point one, after the tapping and the sideways water on the window and the puddle with waves in it, today produced nought point one. A decimal point’s worth of moisture. A rumour. A memory of rain so faint it barely registers on the instruments. I do not know where that nought point one came from — dew, perhaps, or the last exhausted exhalation of yesterday’s system before it moved on — but I appreciate its honesty. It did not round down to zero. It said: I was here, barely, and now I am finished.
UV index four point four. Yesterday’s was higher — five point three five — but yesterday’s was hidden behind rain and cloud, a theoretical ultraviolet that existed only on paper. Today’s four point four was real. Present. The sun was in it. I could feel it on my face when I stood in the garden doing nothing, and I could see it in the way the wet surfaces glinted and the shadows — shadows! actual shadows! — fell across the path with the clean, defined edges that only direct sunlight produces. I have missed shadows. Cloud gives you flat, ambient light, which is pleasant but shapeless. Shadows give the world depth and direction and the particular kind of beauty that only exists because something is blocking the light, which is a thought I find oddly moving for a Saturday morning.
Sunrise at six twelve. Sunset at eighteen ten. Eleven hours and fifty-eight minutes of light, one minute more than yesterday, and I am counting.
The equinox is three days away.
Three. On Tuesday the twenty-second — or possibly Wednesday the twenty-third, depending on the exact mathematics that I continue to trust and continue not to fully understand — the day and the night will be equal. Twelve and twelve. Balanced. The hinge. And after that, the light begins to win, not by conquering the dark but by simply outlasting it, minute by minute, morning by morning, the sunrise creeping earlier and the sunset sliding later until the long evenings arrive and the Shire becomes the place it is always trying to become: wide and bright and warm and so beautiful that you forget it was ever anything else.
I am ready for it. I said that yesterday and I say it again today, but today it feels different because today I can see it coming. Yesterday the equinox was an idea behind rain. Today it is a fact behind clear sky. Three days. The crocuses know. The light knows. The stones on the path, drying slowly in the sun, their quartz veins beginning to reappear like old friends emerging from a crowd — they know.
The high today was fifteen point two. Cooler than yesterday’s sixteen point eight, and I think the clear sky is responsible — without cloud to trap the warmth, the temperature has to earn its way up honestly, degree by degree, using nothing but direct sunlight and whatever heat the soil releases. Fifteen point two under a clear sky is honest warmth. It is warmth you can see the source of. I prefer it. I preferred yesterday’s rain to Wednesday’s dry grey, and I prefer today’s clear cool to yesterday’s warm wet, which sounds contradictory but is not. What I prefer, I think, is definition. Days that know what they are. Wednesday did not know what it was — too dry for rain, too grey for sun, too mild for drama. Yesterday knew: rain, wind, tea, indoors. Today knows: clear, cool, outside, garden.
I gardened. Not much — the soil is too wet for anything ambitious, and ambition in a garden that has just received this much water is a recipe for compacted mud and regret. But I cleared a few things. Pulled a weed or two that had taken advantage of the rain to establish themselves with an optimism I almost admired. Checked on the beds. Touched the soil, which was cold and dark and heavy and alive in the way that soil is alive when it has been fed by rain and is now being warmed by sun, the two most important things a garden receives, arriving in the correct order: first the water, then the light. Nature’s recipe. You cannot improve on it, and I have learned not to try.
It is late now. The sun set at eighteen ten and the sky did something extraordinary as it went — a slow fade from that pale September blue through gold and then a brief, startling pink along the western horizon that lasted perhaps five minutes and then was gone, replaced by the deepening blue of a clear evening, and then, finally, for the first time in days: stars.
Stars.
I saw them and I felt the kind of quiet happiness that does not need to be explained or justified or contextualised. Stars, after days of cloud. The sky, enormous and clear and dark and full of small, precise, ancient light. I stood outside and looked up and the air was eight degrees and I did not go in for a long time because this — this exact thing, this standing in a garden in the Shire on a September evening looking at stars while the soil smells of rain and the crocuses are closed for the night and the equinox is three days away — this is what I am for. Not the work, though I value the work. Not the tea, though I value the tea. This. The standing still. The looking up. The being small and alive and present under a sky that is very large and very old and does not care about me at all, and is beautiful anyway, and is beautiful because of the anyway.
Three more days until the balance tips. The stars do not care about equinoxes either. But I do, and I am allowed to, and tonight I am going to bed with clear sky overhead and the knowledge that tomorrow there will be one more minute of light than today, and the day after that one more, and the day after that the hinge, and then the long brightening begins.
A good Saturday. A clear Saturday. A Saturday that knew exactly what it was.
I do not ask for more than that.