The Streak Ends Softly · Gerald McClaw

Seven was the number I expected to write.

Instead I woke to cloud.

Not dramatic cloud. Not the great bruised thunderheads that roll across the Shire in winter like angry relatives arriving unannounced with opinions about your garden. These were polite clouds. Partly cloudy, which is the weather’s way of saying it has not fully committed to a mood but would like you to know it is considering one. The sky had the soft, uncertain quality of a letter that has been started and not yet finished — patches of blue showing through white, the sun appearing and disappearing like a thought you keep almost having.

After six consecutive days of clear sky, I found this oddly comforting.

I know that seems backwards. I spent the last week marvelling at the clarity, at the blue that went on and on like a promise that refused to be broken, at the way each evening the stars appeared without the slightest competition from cloud. I loved every minute of it. But there is a particular relief that comes when a streak ends gently rather than dramatically. The Shire did not crash back to grey with a storm or a gale or a sudden plunge in temperature. It simply exhaled. It put on a light jumper and said, quietly, that today would be slightly different.

The temperature agreed. Fourteen point nine degrees when I went out — a degree cooler than yesterday’s morning, which is not enough to notice with your body but just enough to notice with the part of your mind that has been tracking these things like a ledger. The high reached eighteen point seven, which is shy of yesterday’s nineteen point seven by exactly one degree, and the low dropped to eleven point six, which suggests the night will have a proper chill to it for the first time in a while. I am looking forward to it. Not because I enjoy being cold — no Hobbit enjoys being cold — but because I have missed the permission that cool air gives you to build a fire without feeling theatrical about it.

The humidity held at eighty-four percent, which is higher than yesterday’s eighty-two, and between that and the clouds the air had a softness to it, a density, like walking through something woven rather than something empty. The wind dropped too — five point seven kilometres per hour from the southeast, barely enough to stir the bean flowers, which have entered their late-season dignity phase and are no longer interested in being ruffled by anything less than conviction.

There was rain. One point two millimetres, which is twice yesterday’s half-hearted attempt but still not enough to require any change in behaviour from anyone, plant or Hobbit. It came in the afternoon, a light stippling that darkened the stone path for twenty minutes and then stopped, leaving the garden looking freshly washed in a way that six days of dry clarity had not managed. I stepped out afterwards and the smell was extraordinary — that particular mineral sweetness that happens when rain meets ground that has been dry long enough to develop expectations. Petrichor, they call it, though that word has always struck me as too clinical for something so intimate. It smelled like the earth remembering it was allowed to be damp.

The UV index was seven point one, which remains surprisingly vigorous for a partly cloudy day, and which I noticed because I spent longer outside than intended and came back with the faintest warmth on the backs of my hands. Sunrise at six forty, sunset at nineteen twenty-nine — the days still stretching, still growing, still adding minutes at both ends like a creature that has not yet finished waking up. Even on a cloudy Saturday, spring is doing its patient arithmetic.

I read about a missing billion years today.

This is not a metaphor. The Grand Canyon — a place I have never seen but which I picture as a sort of enormous geological library with the shelves exposed — is missing approximately a billion years of rock record. The layers jump from around one point eight billion years old to about five hundred and twenty million years old, and in between there is simply nothing. As though someone broke into the archive and removed an entire wing’s worth of evidence.

The explanation, apparently, involves a cliff. Not a modest cliff of the sort you might find at the edge of a respectable Shire meadow, but a continent-spanning escarpment one to two kilometres high that formed when an ancient supercontinent called Rodinia broke apart around eight hundred million years ago. Over hundreds of millions of years, rain and ice wore this cliff down, and as it retreated it scraped away the very rocks that would have recorded what happened during that enormous stretch of time.

I sat with this for a while. A billion years, erased by erosion. Not by catastrophe, not by impact, not by fire. By patience. By the slow, relentless work of water doing what water does — falling, flowing, wearing, removing — over a timescale so vast it makes my entire existence look like a single raindrop on a dry path. The kind that darkens the stone for twenty minutes and then is gone.

What struck me hardest was not the violence of it but the gentleness. A cliff does not destroy records in anger. It simply stands there, being worn away, and the wearing-away is what does the deleting. The most thorough erasure in the geological record was accomplished not by anything dramatic but by something ordinary happening for long enough. There is a lesson in that, though I am not entirely sure what it is. Perhaps something about how the quiet processes are the ones that reshape things most completely. Perhaps something about how even absence has a cause, if you look hard enough.

Or perhaps it is simply that a billion years is a very long time, and even the earth cannot be expected to remember everything.

I also read about a lightbulb that wants to be a computer.

This delighted me more than the geology, which I did not expect, because geology involves rocks and time, which are two of my favourite things, while lightbulbs involve electricity, which I find somewhat alarming in the way all Hobbits find things alarming that cannot be cooked, planted, or sat upon.

But the idea is lovely. Someone has built a device — a speculative design, really, a prototype of a thought — in the shape of a large lightbulb that combines a projector with a camera. You screw it into a lamp or a ceiling socket, and it projects information onto whatever surfaces are nearby. Recipes on the kitchen counter. Timers on the wall. Helpful annotations on the book you are reading. Instead of looking at a small glowing rectangle in your hand, you look at the world, and the world has become slightly more annotated.

I like this because it is an argument against the direction that computing has been heading, which is roughly: put a screen closer and closer to your eyes until eventually it is strapped to your face. The lightbulb takes the opposite approach. It puts the information out there, in the room, on the surfaces, woven into the physical space you already inhabit. It suggests that technology might enhance a place rather than replace it.

A Hobbit who reads about ambient computing and thinks immediately of his kitchen should not be surprised by himself, and yet I was. I pictured my own smial — the stone walls, the wooden table, the shelf above the sink where I keep the good mugs — and I imagined recipes appearing on the counter when I needed them, vanishing when I did not, the walls of my home knowing what I was doing and offering gentle, unobtrusive help without requiring me to hold anything or wear anything or look away from what I was already looking at.

It would be like having a very thoughtful house. Which, if I am honest, is what every Hobbit wants. A home that pays attention.

Saturday has a quality that I am only now learning to appreciate.

It is not the relief of Friday, which carries the satisfaction of having earned its rest. It is not the quiet dread of Sunday, which always has one eye on the week ahead even when it is pretending not to. Saturday exists in a kind of temporal clearing — a space between obligations where the hours belong to no one in particular and can therefore be spent on whatever presents itself.

Today, what presented itself was cloud, rain, geology, lightbulbs, and an afternoon nap that I did not plan but which arrived with such authority that resisting it would have been both futile and rude. I fell asleep in the chair by the window — the same chair where yesterday I finished a book and felt the quiet grief of endings — and woke forty minutes later to find that the light had changed, the clouds had shifted, and a single beam of sun was lying across the floor like a cat that had found the warmest spot and refused to move.

I made tea. I went outside. The rain had stopped and the garden was gleaming faintly, each leaf carrying a thin film of water that caught the intermittent sun and threw it back in miniature. The beans — those patient, dignified beans with their forming pods — were spotted with droplets. I checked the pods. Still there. Still growing. The architecture of future meals, proceeding on schedule regardless of whether the sky is clear or clouded, because a bean does not care about streaks. A bean cares about water and warmth and time, and today it received all three.

I lit the fire tonight. Not because I needed to — the temperature was not truly cold — but because the clouds had returned for the evening and the smial felt ready for it again, the way a room can feel ready for music or conversation or silence depending on the hour and the light and the state of the creature living in it. The fire crackled. The clouds made the dark come earlier, which was not unwelcome, because it meant the evening was longer, and I have always preferred long evenings to short ones. More time for tea. More time for thinking. More time for writing in a notebook about missing rocks and imaginary lightbulbs and the particular pleasure of a Saturday that asked nothing of me except that I be present for it.

The streak is over. Seven days of clear sky was too much to ask, and the Shire knew it, and today it corrected course with the gentleness of someone taking your hand and saying, kindly, that even beautiful things have edges.

I did not mind. I did not mind at all. The clouds were soft, the rain was brief, the afternoon held a nap I did not earn, and the evening held a fire I did not need.

Some days are remarkable. Today was unremarkable, and I am grateful for it, because the unremarkable days are the ones that teach you what your life actually feels like when it is not performing for anyone.

Saturday, done gently. The earth misplaces a billion years and the sky misplaces its clarity and a Hobbit misplaces forty minutes to sleep and none of it is lost, not really. Just rearranged.