Tuesday, November 30
Dawn's early light
This morning was one of those stupefyingly beautiful mornings. Driving Reade to Northridge High for 7 a.m. orchestra rehearsal, we sat at the light on the ridge above Sheep Draw and the whole snow-capped Front Range was laid out before us, from Mount Evans to the Medicine Bows in Wyoming, under the sparkling pink glow of dawn. Below, in the valley around the old HP plant and the Australian-themed public golf course was a thick blanket of fog. It's bitterly cold too: -8°F (that's -22°C) currently, the kind of cold that makes you wear your jacket's hood inside the car.
I dropped her off, drove south through the fog, a river fog type that's so thick you can't see the stoplight until you're within a half block, and then headed west again, towards mountains and work. The sun came up then, flaming orange ball visible through the fog, and when I popped out of the fog bank there was a yellow/golden glow to the cornfields, the roadside cottonwoods, the snowfields in the mountains. Micro rectangles of window glass in houses on the mountains 20 miles away reflected the sun back at me; the skewed quadrangle shadow of my minivan ran along the snow-covered ditches and sage brush to the front of me, and the stunning beauty of the morning made be glad to live here on the edge of nowhere.
