Wind Sock

"A tapered tubular cloth vane, open at both ends and having at the larger end a fixed ring pivoted to swing freely, installed at airports or elsewhere to indicate wind direction and approximate intensity." Dictionary.com

"An elegant structure so intensely beautiful that one must park at the airport and walk across the grass to admire it." Anonymous (who may or may not be the author of this blog post)

It's All about Color

Shell has never looked so good or the theater up the street for that matter.

Gray Sky vs Blue Sky

At the University Farm today, the manager and I chatted about the abundant spinach and chard, the new method of keeping plants warm under covers in extreme cold, a possible student research project in the physics of the plants' warmth under those covers, the squirming larvae due to arrive at the beginning of the semester, and the advantages of photographing plants under gray sky. These advantages can easily be seen.

Their colors do indeed pop.

Even the old dairy building in which the culled deer are refrigerated before butchering and much of the farm's equipment are stored has a certain beauty under our typical winter sky. 

The red bittersweet, ochred wood, fading graffiti do indeed pop.

But.

In a contest of one versus the other, I'd take a strong blue sky and shadows any day.

Even today.

Snow with Silver Skies

but for a brief moment today, this happened:

blue sky, the curative I've needed.

Sewanee's Blue Period Is More Van Gogh than Picasso

Don't believe me? Just look.

Among Other Things, I Am Grateful For

the continuing friendship of a former student and her mother

and the blue sky all the way home.

All It Takes

is just

one moment

of sun

& blue sky

The Day of October Sky

Fall's vault of heaven, blue like Mary's cloak in an illuminated manuscript and that valuable. 

Glorious and burning: now robin's egg, then azure, or lapis, here ultramarine, below denim. 

Under October sky, rock, leaf, cloud, Air Force jet, stripped bark, red jacket, slate roof -- every thing shimmers, transformed, transforming me.