Reprieve

This is the time of year in the Northwest where it sometimes starts to feel like it’s been grey forever. It hasn’t been, exactly — there have been moments or days even of brilliant and beautiful weather — but early last week was so, so rainy, so low-cloud dreary, the kind of weather where it feels like it is fully impossible for it to ever stop raining again.

And then one day, I woke up and it wasn’t raining, and I biked to work in a beautiful, almost-warm pre-dawn, with no rain pants or anything, and when I got to the Columbia Slough, this was what the world looked like:

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(who even knew that Mt Hood was still out there?)

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And it made me inordinately happy, like I cannot overemphasize the heart-swelling happiness I felt when I stopped my bike to gape at this sunrise, geese honking overhead. And a large part of why it made me so happy, I’m sure, is how hard-earned it felt, how gosh-darn reprieved I was to see the mountains again and some color in the sky, and to remember that the days are getting longer and there will certainly be a lot more dreary days, but there are still these sunrises, these glimpses, the birds in the morning, moments where the clouds part and the sun soaks into my skin, however still wanly.

Today has been dreary again, hard-rain dreary, but there are still the birds that are singing like it’s spring, and I wrote most of this sitting on the porch, even though my fingers were frozen and the rest of me was swaddled in a down blanket. The moments of reprieve make it all worth it, and the moment of dreary make the reprieve all the more precious.

2 Comments:

  1. Yes, this! I missed that spectacular sunrise that everyone else caught, since I barely ever have to wake up at a decent time anymore. But while the weather can be oppressive from time to time, bad weather makes one appreciate good weather when it happens. If you lived in a place with sunshine all the time, you’d take it for granted and not appreciate it as much.

    • :) I’ve definitely been thinking of your comics, both the one with the first flowers of the year and the one where you saw Mt Hood from the MAX after forever of not seeing it:) Yay for the little happinesses that you might not even notice if not for the intermittent drearinesses, heh.

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