We woke this morning to snow outlining every branch of the birches, cottonwoods. A light dusting, holding on in the morning hours, to melt without drama by noon. The ground is still frozen, and the snow that falls there will stay throughout the day a bit longer. This is April snow—not quietening the landscape so much as adding an impossibly bright reflection for a sun that is newly high, strong, a spotlight of focus on every branch.
April, that cruelest of months. Especially in high latitudes, when friends from lower latitudes begin to report of daffodils, bluebells, cherry blossoms that make me pine for a more temperate spring. I don’t begrudge the cold and snow that lingers—how it is so bright, distinct from winter snow, that settles in companionship with the dark of winter months. But the spring here is sometimes the hardest part of being from more temperate latitudes, where springs are riots of green and bloom—not mud and melt.
At the same time, the juxtaposition of living in the north with the accounts and images from others around the world where spring is green and blooming settle my post-equinox nerves, when energy is so high and spring feels so close, and yet trails and grounds have merged into glazes of ice and a ski or hike is difficult to manage. I love seeing that spring continues beyond our view of it, an assurance that it too will arrive here someday.
As I wrote that last sentence two snow geese flew by, alto calls newly joining sounds of melt. The first I have seen this year. It always feels like a miracle when snow begins to melt more than fall, when migrating birds return ahead of any green. I wonder if the creek, running stronger behind the house, noticed the geese’s reflection on its inky surface.
There is a new edition of Emily Dickinson’s Letters out, that includes many not published before. It also annotates and restores excisions and erasures that previous editions held. And so of course, I have been reading, returning to that Amherst bedroom in my mind, the trees around the homestead where she lived, the buzzing of the cicadas in the heat of a July wind that I remember in visits to her garden last summer.
In her letters, Dickinson often lingers over descriptions of the season, the weather—keenly aware of what plants will arrive first, musing about the ‘sere and yellow leaf’ of autumn—a line from Macbeth she liked to repeat, with its archaic word sere, meaning dried, withered. She writes lines like this repeatedly in her letters to her brother, to friends, to her beloved Susan:
It’s a glorious afternoon—the sky is blue and warm—the wind blows just enough to keep the clouds sailing, and the sunshine, Oh such sunshine, it is’nt like gold, for gold is dim beside it, it is’nt like anything which you or I have seen!…1
Details of weather, sky, and landscape that weave into strands of poetry in each letter.
There was one particular description that held my imagination for some time, when as a young woman in her twenties she reported to her brother that the church bell began ringing in the evening, and people in town thought it was a fire. But as people rushed out of their homes to find out what was happening they saw the sky—itself the only fire, with a rare showing of red northern lights across Massachusetts:
We were all startled by a violent church bell ringing, and thinking of nothing but [the recent] fire, rushed out in the street to see.
The sky was a beautiful red, bordering on a crimson, and rays of a gold pink color were constantly shooting off from a kind of sun in the centre. People were alarmed at this beautiful Phenomenon, supposing that fires somewhere were coloring the sky. The exhibition lasted for nearly 15—minutes, and the streets were full of people wondering and admiring. Father happened to see it among the very first, and rang the bell himself to call attention to it.2
I loved the description of that scene because it felt akin to my friend texting me from Oregon this week as the eclipse began—that despite it being partial, there were still so many people outside with viewing glasses on, how it felt like everyone had the same desire to witness wonder.
And even from afar, I too, felt some kinship with the synchronicity of so many people also gazing at the sun in that moment. I looked up at the sky—and despite that the eclipse had no bearing on Alaska, I did wonder at how the sun was out so blindingly high and strong that day—as if to make up for the difference shadowed elsewhere.
How surreal it must be to see daylight, always constant, go dark as the sun is eclipsed by a new moon. For noon to become midnight. The moon’s shadow uniting all in its pathway for a brief duration—heads tilted upward, fireflies sparking, bats flying, crickets singing. Watching online and reading others’ accounts was to find people suddenly hit by the enormity of living in a world in relationship with celestial bodies. As well as other bodies in that shadow—crowds of people, nocturnal animals, the air suddenly cooled in response. Crowds cheered in appreciation of the mystery as the moon fully blocked the sun. People surprised at feeling emotional, of being moved to tears, having no words to describe the experience—akin to how medieval mystics felt they could not describe an experience of the divine. How the noise of daily life seems insignificant after an eclipse. And yet how quickly the social world insists on returning, to replace the glasses used to view the sun with blinders of the clock and well-worn grooves of to do.
Our surroundings ask for our attention and are so effortlessly denied. By rote, we isolate ourselves from the land and sky. Insist on living by a clock that claims 8 am, despite the pitch dark skies that linger past 10 am here in December. To have to remain at work in an office during a wondrous sunrise that begs to be celebrated. To live in a world that insists the human world is the only world that matters. To believe that we control the light, banish the dark, and congratulate technology for letting us ignore the season, the tilt of the earth.
It’s a trite cliche to state that we are all bodies of this earth, this cosmos. But despite the cliche, we forget that we are, that we can be out in the world, immersed in our surroundings. Pay attention to the shift in shadow length, the quality of light from a sun turning towards summer.
I have a notification flagged for when northern lights might be visible in our area. The aurora borealis, the northern dawn, the reception of solar flares that can only otherwise be seen with our eyes in an eclipse.
For as much as they are talked about up here, I still have only seen the northern lights a few times—times I missed when I was in the throes of 60-hour work weeks and taking care of a young son. Sleep felt too desperate to give up in such times. And darkness leaves this latitude so quickly in March—the moon and a night sky with stars, let alone northern lights, are already becoming something I have to stay up past 10:30 to find. It won’t be until August now that a truly dark night sky will return.
But last year, as my son, newly licensed, came home late from being out with friends, he rushed into the house on the icy January night excitedly shouting the lights are out! I got up to look out the window with him but the view was obscured by trees, so I pulled on boots and coat over my pajamas and we walked in the neighborhood, despite the cold, to see a ghostly green light curtaining across the sky above us. But as street lights were so bright, we turned back to the house and raced to the car to chase more darkness. To find more lights, sent by the sun to a winterdark night sky, that in another century were described as “rays of a gold pink color…constantly shooting off from a kind of sun in the centre.” It felt like the most important thing we could do that night, and I love the memory of us both excited to look up at the same time, for wonder.
It’s wild when you think that the things that affect all of us, through time and distance—the moon, an eclipse, the happenings of the night sky, the rain, snow, hail, sleet, a slant of sunlight in fall, the wind breathing life into the trees—is derided as small talk. To dismiss the power of storms, or the low hang of a full harvest moon at twilight, or the mildness of a newly warm sun after months of cold as something small. When it’s how the world experiences itself, how it always has. We’re adapted to it, and yet we don’t have time for it any longer as we set our clocks to daylight savings, and get back to work and school out of sync with the earth and night sky, as if there is no difference, despite our groggy and tired bodies. Only when there is something as enormous as the alignment of the earth, sun, and moon at once does part of the world experience the awe that is the collective experience of being of this earth, living in reciprocity with its elements.
I recently read3 that in Shetland the word for long summer twilights is simmer dim. Such beauty in that phrase, the sun lowing to a simmer in the sky, but the fire never completely gone out. The heat of the day turned down to simmer. The repeating i sound in both words. Such precision in the metaphor! A term that makes you feel in your bones that it comes from people in reciprocity with their surroundings, who take heed of the lengthening summer twilight, have spent time marking the quality of that high latitude light. I wonder what language we might have if we could all step outside and notice the sky more often, collectively.
What is the light like where you are? The skies here are snow-geese winged, mountain bright.
Miller, Cristanne and Domhnall Mitchell (eds.). 2024. The Letters of Emily Dickinson. Belknap Press. p. 161
Ibid., pp. 123-4
What a magical land you live in, Freya! Alaska has always held such beauty and wonder for me. Also, Emily’s house. Ah! What a dream space. And her room! 🤩
As I wrote to Meg Conley earlier: "At the time of the eclipse we had just arrived at SeaTac airport in Seattle, two transitory experiences. The sun was 20% obscured by the moon and 100% obscured by clouds. At least we were able to look up, unfiltered."
The sky is now clear, apparently for a for days, then of course periodically returning gloom through "Juneuary" until the official start of summer 5th of July!
In brighter news the rufous hummingbirds have been with us a month and are probably in Juno by now. Do they reach Anchorage?
The gray whales seem to be over their "unusual mortality event" along the California coast. They've been in the Saratoga passage on the east side of Whidbey for a month, feeding at the all-you-can-eat ghost shrimp buffet before heading up to their summer feeding grounds in the Bering Sea. A friend was within feet of one in the Sea of Cortez and an open water swimmer friend found herself within 10 feet of one off Langley.
Now they're headed your way, Freya, bringing summer with them.