An Indigo Mind

Summer sun after a month of rain
red, berry blood, stains hands and lips
they taste of the river, and of the mountain,
and when I am too greedy they tumble from my fingers,
bright rubies lost to tall grass.

When the clouds finally broke this week the sun that shone through was not the oppressive bright eye of summer, but the hot, rich sun of early autumn. The clouds lifted to reveal the mountains I had nearly forgotten were there, dusted with the first fragments of termination dust. The leaves started to change color weeks ago, their green losing its luster.

There is a lot of denial going around now. The truth of it is that if the calendar read ‘September’ instead of ‘August’ nobody would notice a thing – we might even be wondering at how good the weather is.

Here, on the Matanuska, the effects of this summer are easily seen – the river is swelled with rain water, and the normally bare ground is practically lush. The dark clouds that refuse to completely break up cloak the mountain with the threat of rain. The river has actually gone down from a few days ago, when all that was visible on the far side of the river bed was a band of trees between the low cloud ceiling and the thick steam fog rising from the river. I will admit the sunny weather is nice, though I would have traded it in a heart beat for the thunderstorm that rumbled just a few miles away.