THE MATCHING WHITE SKY

There was a hill to the left as you went in. But it was distant and before its beginning was tree cover and chaparral. Sometimes the lightning hit the forest during the storms and some of the old growth was charred black. What must it have been like then to stand in the precipitation, say, during the middle the August night? Sometimes a snake hole or a den would show itself. The hill though. It was white for the snowfall. An April snowfall. Not really with the right characteristics of a fluke either. Why not? Because it had changed from warm to cold, then stayed that way. It was, for all intense purposes,- winter once again. Maybe the radio shows that lived in the witching hour,- that harbored strange guests, people that pontificated on end times and extreme weather change, on cloud seeding by black-op governments, on pole shifts and the rest, were not as peculiar as once thought. Voices in the night to assuage the threat of the void was what they were used for. Not to be taken seriously though. Yet now? Now it was not known. Someone blindfolded to time and calendar, to season and other, - would think it middle winter surely. Yes the hill. The sky was often white there, and it was white that day. The line that the summit would make on the top of its ridge was not there. Instead it mixed seamlessly with the sky. White hill. White sky. And then the winds came and the light drizzle turned again to snow. It came down sideways. The nature walker had tried to recollect his dream from the previous night. He had dreamed of a paragraph. He had gone to sleep trying to discern, even subjectively and for himself, - who could ‘word-smith’ above all else? He had thought of Eliot, Dickens, Proust, Melville, Dostoevsky and a few more. But he kept coming up with Conrad. Conrad, Conrad, Conrad, Conrad, Conrad. It was as if his ghost came through. The dreamer had his reasons also. Some of the others, as odd as it may sound,- did not have death beside them, and only spoke really of exoteric, above ground things. They went into psychology, sure, human emotion and motive, nuance and even insight. But Conrad did more and framed it more in the sentences. That was his intuitive feeling. No scholar, but an autodidact’s hunch. And who would care? And what would it matter? In time, all things would somehow go back into the nothingness. Art, books, people, ideas, forests and their chaparral and the hotness and coldness both. For now, - there was the recollection of a paragraph, and important paragraph, - the black lines or typed words, - but not the meaning of the words. And the hill. 

The hill that had for its top had not itself but the matching white sky. 


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