Sunset, Wednesday, 12 August 2009

William Theodore Van Doren. Stony Point, Albemarle County, Va. Oil on paper, 16 x 20.

My brother Michael Addison Van Doren, of Austin, Texas, the most astronomically inclined of all our fanatically meteorologically inclined clan, advises us to check out the Perseids in that “universal palette,” the sky, and make our own “attestation to the heavens.” (Yes, he’s even worse than I am, I believe.) He quotes his fellow University of Virginia–based dreamer and wanderer, Poe, from “Evening Star”:

’Twas noontime of summer,
And mid-time of night ...

My excuse for forgetting the Perseids has been clouds, clouds, clouds. In the woods today with Flint there was full cloud cover and a little rain, so I was surprised for an instant by sunlight over the ground – didn’t make sense. There was the thick brown-gray dead-leaf layer, then green running cedar all over the place. Everywhere in the cedar, little dogwood seedlings had popped up, two or three leaves each, and less than a foot high. Those that probably won’t make it had turned yellow – little groups of dying dogwoods. Pale yellow dogwood sunlight.