| The mimosa in the balcony has bloomed, |  |
| and Laurustinus in the terrace |  |
| I‘ve spread dung |  |
| and planted lettuces |  |
| and tomatos |  |
Category: Seasons
Golden light afternoons
As we approach the winter solstice, the sun, as if trying to compensate somehow his daily premature retirement, gets closer: His rays reach us in a more horizontal angle, as if the lightning technician switched the zenital light for a lateral focus, pointing at us right from one side of the stage.
I hurry back from work and all the way along I can see the shadows increasing in lenght as the sun lows down.
I know that this complimentary show doesn’t last long. When I reach home, about four, it’s been running already for an hour. A golden light fills generously the living room and bedroom. I enter as if it was a pool of light.
On weekends we can afford to be on time for the beginning of the show and make it coincide with lunch. Then, the light wave reaches the table, it spreads across the white table linen and the dish with the salad shines full of colors like a coral reef.
I amuse myself looking at the shadows of the glas full water, turned a prism.
Afterwards my bed invites me to a nap; receiving the sun it is like a bathtub full of light instead of water. I lie down, close my eyes and perceive the tangent winter light almost like a tactile sensation…
A Visit to fall foliage exhibition
Every year when this season comes, exhibitions and galleries about colour change, from green to yellow, ocre, brown, are offered to the public interested. Here we don’t have catalogues as are provided in other places but it is not difficult to make a good guess if Montseny or Garrotxa are chosen as destinations.
This time we decided to do a walk around Grenys hill, at the NW of the massif, departing from Santa Fe.
The first rooms proposed a big surface covered by sienna leaves, trunk colons at both sides and the ceiling canopy still green. Mist, soft light, a scent of wet wood, the sound of footsteps on the fallen leaves. Firs, maples, chestnuttrees, beeches.
Extraordinary composition out of chestnuttree leaves.
A monumental sculpture? the big chestnuttree called “Roter”.
A note about literary suggestions that was not there could have pointed out that these forests might stage a scene of epic adventures, the search for the Holy Grail or the quest for the fountain of life and eternal youth.
A second missing instructive note would tell us that the reason deciduous trees decide to change the colour of the leaves is not because it gets colder but because there are more hours of darkness. due to the descent from the temperature as well as for the increase of the times of darkness at night. This stops the process of renewal of the green chlorophyl that has been concealing the golden colours that were already there. Ah! Perhaps the trees wisely cover their golden shine when the light is too intense and only reveal it when illumination conditions are appropriate.
Almond trees blossom
The TV set is back and alive. We can follow again the normal TV program schedule. Too many things not to be missed! Among them, and outside the sitting room,nature’s seasons program schedule. Its program listing features general rebirth in spring, alpine plants in summer, golden colours in autumn, that clean and tangential light in clear winter days and now, in early march, almond trees blossom.
We went to see them in Penedès vineyard’s, in Sant Sebastià dels Gorgs were we rode our bikes. The day a bit cloudy but providing an interesting light nevertheless. It must have been a cold winter because many trees were still waiting for blossom and it took some pedaling before we could make out, against a background of grey and green fields, the diffuse white clouds made out of the new flowers that, in coming near, become treetop structures and finally in close-up, fragrant pentagonal simetries.
We spent about an hour, looking for and comparing views, like if we were the privileged sole visitors of a museum whose pictures and sculptures lack labels and it were our job or play to guess who is the author, the school or style. O perhaps, rather than a museum with landscape paintings it is like a Noh theater play, in which the trees, players almost immobile during the whole act, burst in flower in the last scene?
