Here in
Texas, exposed as we are to tropical fronts and Northern ones alternately, the
weather can change with cinematic abruptness, and does. In fall and winter the
temperature may plunge 40+ degrees in a day when a cold front of the kind
Texans call a Blue Norther blows through, frequently accompanied
by all kinds of meteorological melodrama--tornadoes, hailstorms, and the like--but
thankfully disposing of the steamy tropical fug and sweeping clean the skies.
Then, for a couple of days, before the first mellow outliers of the tropics
start creeping back like jungle vines, we enjoy brisk temperatures, dry air,
and a sky of intoxicating, burnished blue, like the ceiling of the Sainte
Chapelle stretching into infinity, or a child's dream of Heaven. Or Philip
Larkin's.
Rather than
words comes the thought of high windows;
The
sun-comprehending glass,
And beyond
it, the deep blue air, that shows
Nothing,
and is nowhere, and is endless.
(From High Windows, by Philip Larkin.)
