A Blue and Green Morning

We have woken up in many different locations over the past few weeks and spent our days in a variety of light conditions, the most wonderful of which has always been the sunset light out in the desert that surrounds Palmyra and its oasis. At that time there is a hyper real quality to the world as every rock and pebble is illuminated and the world is gold with a hint of rose. Your skin glows with the colours that were flattened at midday by the high white sun. The dust-coloured Bedouin tents where Atala and his family live stand on the rise, and the camels come walking home. It is a time and a light worth waiting for every day.

Sunsets in Nova Scotia can also be wonderful, especially with the length of twilight time and the magic light of the gloaming, but it was the early light this morning that captured my attention. The wind was light out of the northwest, the air was dry, and the harbour was quiet and blue. It was an early summer northern light, clean, clear, and beautiful.

Decades ago I went to a Bergman film that was set on an island somewhere in Scandinavia. The film was black-and-white and one thing I remember most clearly from it was the whiteness of the summer light and the pale children playing on a pebble beach – it made me reflect on the thin evanescence of northern summers. Our summers here, farther south than Bergman’s landscapes, are still not lengthy, even though the holiday period from school’s closure in June through to Labour Day seemed limitless and infinite when we were kids, so we need to cherish every moment that suggests the presence of summer.

This morning there was nothing thin about the early golden light. The new foliage on the summer trees was brilliantly green, a goldfinch stopped fortuitously next to an orange azalea bloom, the cardinal sang from its usual pine tree, and the sky was a deep and shining blue. Everything was illuminated. It was a "large day", a blue and green morning in Nova Scotia.