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In the comments to my previous post, I mentioned that I don't know of any words other than "predawn" for the period of time between first light and sunrise, whereas there are a number of words for the period right after sunset, including twilight, dusk, and, as [livejournal.com profile] holyoutlaw mentioned, gloaming, which is a word I first encountered in Donaldson's clenched Thomas Covenant books.

Meanwhile, [livejournal.com profile] numbat said that when he worked the night shift, he enjoyed the opportunity to see "the magnificent early morning skies." Here in Seattle, this is the part of the year when I see more magnificent early morning skies than normal, because the shorter days mean that I head off to work right around sunrise. I particularly love the Maxwell Parrish skies that are a cool, steady, translucent gradation of silver to infinite indigo still speckled with stars, and I love the loud, lurid, Technicolor coral-orange skies of flame.

My favorite magnificent early morning sky remains one I saw once when walking home from my girlfriend's apartment in Wallingford twenty years ago. As I groggily crossed an open field in a park, I looked up and saw a cloud stretched from one end of the sky to the other. A crescent moon hung above the cloud, and the sun was still just over the horizon below, so the cloud was lit silver on top with moonlight and gold underneath from the first rays of sunlight. All this in an otherwise clear sky of pale, pearly grey-green. It seemed as though I had stepped out into morning on an alien planet where everything was more painfully beautiful than on Earth.

Perhaps magnificent early morning skies are meant to compensate for having to be awake at such a godawful hour.
randy_byers: (Default)
The dawn sky this morning was a lovely pale periwinkle, stately and sedate.

Yesterday started out foggy but then turned blue-sky sunny. I went for two long walks in it, bathing in the light. Walked down to the Montlake Cut, in fact, where the water shot lances of light into my eyes. So okay, that was too much of a good thing.

Last night when I left work the sky was still full of light. As promised, the days are getting longer. Praised be the forces at work.
randy_byers: (Default)
Had an [livejournal.com profile] akirlu moment this morning.

When I got to the bottom of the Wallingford ridge on 36th on my walk to work, I looked right for traffic and saw that all the glass towers downtown were gleaming with gentle rosy light on their eastern facades. Don't think that was what Homer had in mind with the "fingers" metaphor! The rosy light reflected off the towers and onto the waters of Lake Union, where it was fractured by slow, breezy ripples. The sky behind the I5 bridge was incandescent with roses and corals and muted pearly lavenders. The disk of the sun was still hidden by the Cascades. As I got onto the Burke Gilman trail, I could see that the UW dorms were glaring with the dawn light, too, except more orange than rose. Then the sky behind the bridge started going orange too, flaring towards yellow at the horizon. The entire lake was now aflame with wild colors, like the lurid cover on a gothic romance. It seemed that starting out for work at pre-dawn o'clock was the best idea I'd ever had.

Sometimes this city is goddamned beautiful.

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