Sunset, Monday, 11 May 2009

Stony Point, Albemarle County, Va. Oil on paper, 16 x 20.If you paint sunsets, and I guess particularly if you paint a lot of them – O.K., I mean, especially if you paint every single last one of them and need to clean your brushes and scrub your hands before you can even touch the camera and begin the process of posting – there is often a temptation to cheat just a little, as in, “Oh, c’mon, the sky’s obviously not going to change in the next 15 minutes, maybe I can paint now and not wait ... ” 

And it seems that at least every other night for the last couple of weeks, if I had done that, I would have missed some completely unexpected phenomenon that didn’t even appear possible until the very last moment – determined gray skies, usually, that decided to burn themselves in a bright flame before they left.

Tonight, again, I thought the same thing – a cloud cover had come along and I thought, “What you see is what you’re gonna get.”

Wrong again! – except this time, the change was in the opposite direction. Out of the moderate cover came an arc of cloud that made me go check and see if “wall of doom” was in the forecast.

Instead of a predicted wall of doom, we had “a slight chance of showers.” Radar did show a wall of something, and I turned the usual view a little farther north to get more of it.

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The high temperature dropped 20 degrees today, and when I was out with Flint I saw the blackberry blossoms were about halfway out. I was tempted to call today blackberry winter, but I’m going to hold out for a longer, more dramatic cool snap, a true ‘spell’ of weather, preferably when most of the blossoms are out.

The wild blueberries are all in bloom, though, so I’ll designate today a touch of huckleberry autumn.