For a moment before dusk, the sky was sky-blue. Like looking into a pool, only overhead, the sky’s edges around its horizons were pale, chalky, blackbird egg blue, deepening through Wedgwood into the above as it thickened ultramarine and darkened inkily towards space.
Oddly, the colour gained more substance as the atmosphere became thinnest, so that light itself was the material of air. From high on the Edge, the blue replaced everything I noticed about the sky: crazy shoals of rooks and jackdaws, arrowheads of geese, wraiths of starlings speeding towards murmurations.
Instead of the sky being the backdrop for the winter traffic of birds, it was as if Earth’s gravity had emptied it, pulling aerial life into the clag of paths and frosted grass to fall within the beautiful litter of autumn leaves.
Yesterday a wind came that was powerful enough to sway oak trees like grass and brought a downpour as if all of autumn’s rains came in a single bucket. Perhaps that ferocious little storm had purged the sky, because today it was mesmerising in its vast, open, yonderness.
The clear blue moment didn’t last long. A police helicopter, like a fly with a light blinking at the end of its abdomen, flew under the waning moon that was now leaning into the sky. Clouds began to smoke in from the edges, freighted with weather and night.
The feeling of being adrift in space vanished and was replaced by more intimate views: the ash treetops, their bare black staves and twigs like capillaries; the bright red of rose hips, hawthorn and bryony berries.
There is something about the combination of sky-blue, red and black that fascinates me – I don’t understand why. At dusk I watched an elderly woman, with a coat as blue as the fragments of light in the darkening sky, cross the road with an elderly black dog, the collar around its neck flashing red as they walked.
There was something incomprehensibly wonderful about this vision. Perhaps it’s the combination of the colours – sky, berries, winter trees – that mean something distinctly and beautifully Novemberish, however they appear.
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