Gray Day, Silver Outlook

It’s not always a bad thing, this color, or lack of color, that man calls gray. After all, what is the difference between gray and silver but the amount of light that’s reflected? My Fleetwood Cadillac might be called gray by some, but the title says it’s silver. A man whose black hair is losing its pigment at the temples might be said to have silvering hair, while one with light brown is graying, yet they might be exactly the same shade. I guess gray and silver are in the eyes of the beholders.

Looking outside today, I am greeted by what most would call a gray day. It isn’t the kind of day with black or purple, towering clouds, swollen with rain, ready to assault the earth with lightning, or to reverberate with the pounding, sonorous boom of thunder. Rather, it is one of those days where the gray clouds hang low over blue, snow-dusted mountain, dusky foothill, and amber plains alike. One of those days that starts out misting, and you can see the gray bleakness stretch beyond the horizon, and you know that the entire day, from dawn to dusk, is going to sleep in this dim-lit blanket of fog-like quietude. The entire day, at least infrequently, will drip with the rains of autumn. And if you aren’t careful, your mood will become as gray as the day.

The silver in a day like this comes, perhaps, because two of the things I claim most deeply are to be a lover of nature, and an artist. I have on my land over one hundred fifty trees, and hundreds of flowers, all of which are loving this day. They stand quietly as the silver autumn mists wisp like smoke to the ground, as the cooling and calming waters of October-end seep like lifeblood into the thirsty soil. Except perhaps for spring, this is the time of year for which the landscape holds its breath most impatiently, waiting for reprieve from the triple digits of summer. It is this time of year that gifts the land with its last long drink of water before laying the soil and the flowers, the grass and trees, down for their long winter’s nap under sheets of blue ice and blankets of sparkling snow. It is this time of year that goes down with a promise of things that are brighter, things that are full of life and color, and not so very far away.

Now is the gardener’s time of reprieve from watering, from weeding, and from the harvest. It is the time to sit at one’s window, a down comforter across one’s lap, sipping hot cocoa and gazing at the wintry blue landscape and city lights that sparkle through the chattering, wind-battered branches of the trees. It is the artist’s time of contemplation, of thanks for the beauty of the fall, appreciation for the austere and solemn snowscape, the chickadees and juncos that flit among the crab apples or the mountain ash berries, still stark red or flaming orange against the drab purple-gray of the bony branches left by the old year gone.

Two days ago my wife and I stood in the logging yard at Pratt Logging, in Blackfoot, Idaho, surrounded by the scent of new-felled lodgepole pine and the pitchy-sweet aroma of burning pine slash. The sun was bright, and golden and fiery leaves surrounded us on every side. Sawdust was thick beneath our feet, and its fresh-cut perfume rose up to us with every step. So soon that sunshine faded, and this grayness—this silver—flowed down over us, this sign of autumn lying down to rest.

To an artist, to a friend of nature, this isn’t dull grayness. This is the silver promise of a ghostly white winter, melancholy on some days, sparkling with the brightness of broken diamonds on others, yet in all cases only a sweet March breath away from new grass and flowers, new growth on the trees, and new life in the landscape.