Reports From Unknown Places

We report: mid-March, it still gets properly cold. It is freezing out here, especially when the sun is gone for long stretches of time. The wind is whipping our hair into our eyes while we watch bright green surge out of the ground; a strange colour after all these months.

We report late in the evening, in a pre-sunset kind of situation. It is a consolation sunset that happens when the sky will be too overcast for the genuine sunset, later on. We are not very upset; it is very windy, and we can feel the rain coming on in the weight of the clouds.

We report: the humidity has fallen on us ravenous with the night, and we feel it in the sharp edges of the air (our expert’s nose is very red). There is something a little eerie about this moment; the sky already dark, a few stars out, and yet the clouds are still bright.

We report about a day when the sky was always either almost or completely full of unspun wool. As unspun wool does, it would tangle and catch; the pure white of sunlit clouds always rolled up into the dark greys eventually. All of this, and only a countable amount of raindrops.

We report: no sharp edges on the clouds today, nothing ever very committed or decisive in their movements. We walk alongside a few of them, and it is a leisurely pace. On the way, they repeatedly dissolve and build back up to the same fuzzy shapes, and we never get anywhere.

We report a few minutes after the sun has gone down: the sky has been hazy all day long for some reason. Because of the surprisingly low volume of humidity, our expert thinks this could be dust, or sand suspended in the air. As a result, the sun was sunset orange for a long time.

We report: it is a real, authentic drizzly morning. It is raining just enough for the surface of the water to break. The air is layered with the smell of wet earth, pond water, and whatever is unique to this specific morning. We see something move underneath the duckweed.

We report as the weather turns all the ways it is able to turn. Once again, we got a little too confident in thinking we knew much of anything about the workings of the sky. We think this is always how it goes when the seasons change, and the patterns become unrecognisable.

We report: there is some kind of symphony composing itself in the sky this morning. We can almost hear how it goes just by looking at it, abstract sheet music changing from second to second. It is a little colder than the past few days, and the wind feels bracing.

We report at the end of a strange, warm, sunny day. We spent it attempting to reconcile our idea of an early March day with the lukewarm wind we felt on our face. As the sun is setting, the crisp humidity is swallowing half of the thermometer in one fell swoop.

We report: come March, the moon starts moving out of range of our window, and it becomes a bit more difficult to seek it out. Even then, it is impossible to miss the way the sky becomes brighter and brighter every night in its waxing. Tonight, we lean far over the windowsill.

We report on one of the first few days of meteorological spring: we are slowly getting reacquainted with the intermittent presence of the sun. It is so far quite content to remain at a distance. We look for rays to walk into wherever we can, and they are rare and thin.

We report: we are almost late somewhere, and we certainly do not have time to linger, but we found some supercilium clouds in the windy sky. This is an unofficial classification for short-lived, eyebrow-shaped clouds. We take the risk to keep watching them embrace the airflow.

We report: the sun is rising earlier still, but we do not feel as exhausted in the morning light as we did a few weeks ago. There are minuscule leaves sprouting from a branch outside of the kitchen window, and we watch them unfurl with disproportionate intensity.

We report as we close our eyes: on nights when we have trouble falling asleep, we send our mind to wander amongst the stars. In this state of half-wakefulness, the darkness is more comforting than it is cold, and we find paths to galaxies in places no one will ever reach.

We report: we have noticed over the course of our life that rainbows are excellent bookmarks, in the sense that a day featuring a rainbow will stay engraved in our memory for much longer. A day featuring a double rainbow will be remembered for twice as long; twice the bookmarks.

We report on a sunny morning: it is almost like the past weeks of continuous rain never even happened. It is surprisingly easy to forget, for a moment, that we have seen all these streets turn into rivers, and all these drains overflow. The sun is still a little low in the sky.

We report: we have been walking up the hill, and every time we think the sun has finally set, the steps we take towards the top reveal a little bit more light. We have to imagine that at some point, however, whether we get there or not, the sun will fully disappear.

We report: it is difficult to get rid of the damp these days, the way it has penetrated everything and everywhere around us. Our expert’s shoes hardly ever get to dry in between days of trodding through puddles and wet grass. It is not quite raining yet, this morning.

We report: this time, we were there as the mammatus were forming, instead of catching them as they were melting back into the sky. It was a single ripple that first caught our eye, and then we watched the clouds carve themselves into the pattern. We started feeling really small.

We report: we are counting flowers on our walks. There are dozens of daffodils and primroses, escaping gardens and climbing roundabouts. This afternoon, while the sun is out, the yellow specks in the landscape are the brightest, happiest things we have seen in a while.

We report at the end of a day spent formulating thoughts, and organising them, and losing the train of them: we are now appreciating the luxury of letting them all go. The sunset, at the moment, requires no additional thinking from us. Our mind gets filled with orange light.

We report: by the road, in the headlights, the birch trees stretch up into the sky like frozen lightning bolts. Not much wind tonight, but it is enough to tear some whines and groans from those skinny branches. We think we see a straggler from the Alpha Centaurid meteor shower.

We report on the foreshore, while a spring tide is rising. It is just after the new moon, and because we saw how low the sea retreated, we know we should not linger too long on the shoals if we do not want to get stuck there. We pull our expert from the low tide pools.

We report: late afternoon, the wind is dishevelling the clouds. This is one hour of sunshine in the rainiest winter we have ever encountered, which makes it very precious, even as the humidity is still permeating the air. Even our expert does not say a word about upcoming rain.

We report in the dusty, dusty evening. The way this day is waning is through a succession of layers of night. All of them are thin enough that there never is an exact moment when we can declare the conclusion of the day. Once we make it back home, the dust finally settles.

We report: it was dark when we started walking. We cannot help but imagine the places we were as still hidden in the night, with the street lamps still on. Here, in this slice of time, the sun is about to rise, unobscured in its ascent for the first time in many days.

We report upon finding the sun in the rain: it makes no rainbow behind our back, but we forgive it easily for that. Later, when it is gone, we miss it, and even later, when it comes back, we are grateful. All throughout, it keeps on raining all the kinds of rain we know.

We report: the very beginnings of spring are appearing to us more clearly than ever today. It is extremely premature, but we cannot help it; every year, around mid-February, the wind starts carrying a different smell. Our expert says they cannot tell whether that is true.

We report on the shore after a busy weather day: there is a truce, somewhat. Though we can see cumulonimbus and other likely rainy episodes float on the horizon, they pass us by in the driest way they are able to. Our expert is looking for stones to skim, and failing to find any.