pull up a chair

i tend toward the grays. and i don’t mean the pewter locks atop my head. i refer here to my meteorological preferences.

i’m of celtic persuasion, which means a pigeon-colored sky, preferably with mists rolling in, a landscape without shadow, for clouds are in the way, that’s the sort of day that wraps me like an afghan dropped from heaven’s hutch, makes me feel cozied by the hearth, deeply much at home. 

give me a gray day and i all but purr. 

this week, though, has been anomaly. the sunbeams of this latest swatch of springtime have been pouring in full proof, and voluptuously so. sunbeams so pure, so concentrated, i’ve bridled the urge to stick out my tongue and lick them––as if a gelato on a cone. or gulp, as if a nectar in the most delicate cut-glass flute that ever was.

it wasn’t lost on me how novel it was for me to be fixated––and bedazzled––by the motes of sunlight shafting in. it shook me from some rafters i’d not even realized had boxed me in. i was paying attention to my paying attention. an attunement to the nth power. and the simple substance that transfixed me was but one of that elemental trilogy: sunlight, water, air. 

to live in a state of fine-grained attentiveness is the instructive of every sage or prophet who’s walked this sunlit earth. for us to notice celestial shifts, as winter turns to spring, as the great star is jimmied higher into sky, must be God’s rapturous delight.

and i must have been more sun-starved than i realized after a long and washed-out winter, for i couldn’t keep myself inside the house this whole week long. i was all but stripping bare my crepe-papery arms and legs, so my famished flesh could guzzle sun. and, every chance i got (and even those i didn’t have), i found myself down on my knees, at the garden’s edge, wherever tender growing things gave me excuse to coax and coddle and slapdash in the dirt. 

from nearly sun-up to sundown, i was out and about, clocking miles on my soles, slip-sliding along a river trail, dodging red-winged blackbirds who tried to perforate my noggin. and, when my legs and knees were tuckered out, i sat splotched in sprees of golden light as i perched, robin-like, atop a rock or stoop, keeping watch on flutterings in trees. 

i’m not typically a sunshine girl. despite a nomenclature suggesting otherwise.

long long ago, there was a fine irishman––my witty papa––who pinned a moniker on me back in the days when i’d take him by the hand and maybe reach just beyond his knees. he called me his sunshine girl, his one and only, and it’s a name that makes my knees go limp even to this day. 

i’ve not heard his voice in 43 years, but i can see the glint in his eyes, the way the pilot light burned bright and brighter, as he warmed up to pronounce the words, deeming me his sunlit girl. 

i rather fail my reputation.

in the long years of his absence, i’ve grown more inclined to sunshine’s shadowless counterpart, the days some define as “the color of bad weather.” i protest, tend to be of a mind with leo da vinci, the polymath and painter, who insisted “a gray day provides the best light.”

though not this golden-glowing week. and not without exception.  

like the poets emily D and annie dillard, i like my light in slants, or as dillard put it once: “i’m a collector” of such angled penetrations. the oblique is how i see things best.

most days, pure drenched feels too exposed. the white light of summer’s height makes me wither. 

springtime, though, is tender season. and the sunlight comes in slant, in perfect concentration. and every once in a rare while, in days as delicious as the sun-drenched string that was this week, i’ll gulp my yearly dose of solar plenty. and i’ll gulp it without pause. 

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speaking of sunshine and the irish, here’s a line that made me laugh aloud this week:

“the sad truth is that, like fish, the looks of the irish are not improved by sunshine . . .”

—Niall Williams, This is Happiness, page 193

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and as is my wont, i’ll bring mary oliver into the conversation, as she came to mind more than once when i was down on my garden knees this week: in “the summer’s day,” she writes:

“I don’t know exactly what a prayer is. /  I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down / into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass, / how to be idle and blessed.”

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and, lastly, i zoomed into a poetry conversation with the poet (and yale institute of sacred music professor) christian wiman the other day, and he was asked to read a poem that shocks right through him, and here’s the one he read: 

Prayer
by Carol Ann Duffy

Some days, although we cannot pray, a prayer
utters itself. So, a woman will lift
her head from the sieve of her hands and stare
at the minims sung by a tree, a sudden gift.

Some nights, although we are faithless, the truth
enters our hearts, that small familiar pain;
then a man will stand stock-still, hearing his youth
in the distant Latin chanting of a train.

Pray for us now. Grade 1 piano scales
console the lodger looking out across
a Midlands town. Then dusk, and someone calls
a child's name as though they named their loss.

Darkness outside. Inside, the radio's prayer —
Rockall. Malin. Dogger. Finisterre.

(the four names in the last line are towns called out on BBC radio’s nightly “shipping forecast” for the various seas around the british isles, waters divided into 31 sea areas, including rockall, malin, dogger, and finisterre. the broadcast litanies, especially the late-at-night ones, are for many britons––including carol ann duffy––a familiar touchstone: the announcer’s voice reciting the sea areas all around the islands, one by one, forecasting the weather. and, higher up, minims are the half-notes in a page of musical notation)

of all the meteorological options, which one most floats your boat? and how and why?