9 February 2011 (wednesday morning)

Beautiful clear morning today, and cold. I stood in the gap between the treeshadow and waited for a bus that didn’t come, warming my face in the rare golden light and clenching my raw red hands against my hips.

The water sparkled blue and choppy despite the lack of wind, and the far shore of the lake formed the first row of a terrace of backdrops, treeline after treeline and ridges upon foothill ranges, which faded back in progressive shades of yellow and gray into the weak white sky.

As the bus pulled out into the road I caught a glimpse of the Watcher haloed in cold morning fire.

7 February 2011 (monday morning)

I walked down the driveway of my girlfriend’s parents’ house to take out the trash. It was balmy, almost warm by many accounts, and under my bare feet the ground was wet and strewn with soggy green needles and branches from the night’s storm. It was halfway clear, and the sun shone through a tear in the clouds out to the Olympics across the Sound.

When we left an hour later to drive back to Seattle the wind had blown the warm air up against the mountains to the east, giving us in exchange a dry numbing cold that made us clench our hands into fists. By the time we reached the Pierce-King County meridian, the wind had finished closing off the sky from us, and the morning was dark again.