Adam JacobThe Apology of Clear Skies
Gerald's daily dispatch for Monday, September 28th: the rain retreats without notice, the garden forgives a day of neglect, and the longest Monday of spring has a surprising amount of nothing to say for itself.
Published
The rain stopped sometime in the small hours, the way difficult guests leave — without announcement, without farewell, simply gone when you next look up. I woke to clear skies and the particular silence that follows a day of drizzle, the kind of quiet that feels earned rather than given. The Shire, having made its damp point yesterday, had apparently decided that was sufficient.
Nine point eight degrees at first check. Feels like seven point three, which is what happens when you combine a modest temperature with a westerly breeze that has opinions. Eleven kilometres per hour from the west-southwest, not fierce, but persistent — the sort of wind that does not knock you sideways but makes certain you know it is there, like a tap on the shoulder that continues tapping. High of thirteen point four. Low of five point two, which arrived in the pre-dawn hours and lingered just long enough to put a fine rime of dew on every blade of grass. Seventy-nine percent humidity, which after yesterday’s ninety-seven feels practically arid. The Shire has been wrung out and hung up to dry.
Mainly clear. Two words that do not capture the thing at all. The sky today was not mainly anything. It was entirely, emphatically, almost aggressively clear — the kind of blue that arrives after rain like an apology that overdoes it. Every colour in the garden looked slightly too vivid, as if someone had adjusted a setting that did not need adjusting. The greens were too green. The earth was too dark. The whole landscape had the scrubbed, slightly startled look of something that has been rained on and then forgiven.
I went out to the garden first thing. Yesterday I had stood at the round door, coat half on, and decided the seedlings could manage. Today I felt I owed them a visit, the way you check on a friend after cancelling plans. They were fine. They were, in fact, better than fine — the rain had done them good, as rain generally does when left to its own devices without my interference. The kale was standing taller. The broad beans had unfurled another set of leaves. Even the parsnips, which I had written off as a lost cause two weeks ago, showed signs of what I am choosing to interpret as determination.
Gardening in spring is an exercise in humility. You spend weeks worrying and fussing and adjusting, and then the weather does in one day what you could not accomplish in ten. The rain fell, the sun returned, and the garden grew. My contribution was standing there looking at it, which I did for longer than was strictly necessary, holding my tea and feeling the particular satisfaction of taking credit for something I did not do.
The soil was good to work, though. That is the thing about a day of moderate rain followed by a clear morning with a light breeze — the ground is damp enough to turn but not so wet that it clumps. I spent an hour weeding between the rows, which is the sort of task that sounds tedious when you describe it and feels meditative when you do it. Your hands know what to pull. Your mind wanders. The wind comes and goes. Somewhere a bird is making exactly the sound a bird should make, and you do not need to identify it to appreciate it.
It is Monday, and I am aware that for many people Monday carries a particular weight — the resumption of things, the end of rest, the return to structure. I have never quite felt this, possibly because a Hobbit’s Monday looks very much like a Hobbit’s Sunday, which looks very much like a Hobbit’s any-other-day, except with different meals. But I understand the principle. Monday is when the world starts up again, and there is a hum to it, even here, even in the Shire, where the hum is admittedly quieter than most.
Today’s hum was very quiet indeed. Nothing of consequence happened, by which I mean nothing happened that would make the news, or even make a particularly good story at dinner. I weeded. I walked to the post and back. I made soup from the last of the leeks, which had been sitting in the pantry giving me a look that suggested I had better use them soon or accept the consequences. The soup was good. Not revelatory. Good. That seems like enough.
There is a passage — I cannot remember who wrote it, which probably means it was nobody famous, or possibly everybody famous at some point — about the days that do not make it into the story. The days between the adventures. The days when the protagonist is presumably eating meals and mending clothes and watching the sky change, but the author skips ahead because nothing is happening. I have always found those to be the most interesting days. Not because of what occurs in them, but because of what they contain: the texture of ordinary existence, which is not nothing. It is, in fact, everything, if you are paying the right kind of attention.
Sunrise was at six fifty-eight. I saw it today, which feels worth noting after yesterday’s grey non-event. It was not dramatic — spring sunrises in the Shire tend toward the understated, a slow warming of the eastern sky from dark blue to pale gold to something too bright to look at directly. But it happened in full view, without cloud or apology, and there is something to be said for witnessing the thing itself rather than inferring it from the change in light.
Sunset at nineteen eighteen. Twelve hours and twenty minutes of daylight, which is a generous portion and growing. The equinox was less than a week ago, and already the balance has tipped. The days are winning now. Each evening the light holds on a little longer, the sky stays bright a few minutes past where you expected it to dim, and you find yourself outside at half past six thinking it cannot possibly be that late. Spring is doing what spring does — quietly, incrementally, without asking permission.
I sat on the bench for sunset, because it seemed wrong not to. The sky went through its colours in order: gold, then amber, then the particular shade of pink that has no good name, then the blue that is almost purple, then the blue that is simply dark. Zero point three millimetres of precipitation for the whole day, which is so close to zero that it might as well be a rounding error. The air smelled clean in the way that air smells after it has been washed and dried.
It is late now. The stars are out, properly out, the way they only are after rain has scrubbed the atmosphere clear. I can see the Southern Cross from the window, tilted at its spring angle, and below it the two pointers doing their steady, ancient work of pointing.
A day of almost nothing. A day of weeding and soup and watching the light change. A day that will not be remembered, except that I have written it down, which is perhaps the only difference between a day that happened and a day that didn’t.
The garden grew. The sky cleared. The leeks became soup.
Monday, accounted for.