Heliotrope

Today is a cold morning, only 46, but the sun is shining brightly in clear blue sky.  Yesterday as I set out on my walk to the gym it was overcast, a very grey sky, and cold enough to wear a light jacket, maybe low sixties.  But, for some reason I rejoiced.  I guess it was the nostalgia of walking briskly, freshly in chilly air, under grim skies.  So Boston!  I remember a student of mine years ago, an import from London, who complained of the excessive number of sunny days in New England, confiding that he truly yearned for a week or so of leaden skies.  I must say when I lived in Palo Alto I never grew to love the incessant morning fog, which seemed often to soften the image of everything sufficiently as to make the breakfast hour into a cozy time, only at ten in the morning inevitably as the fog lifted that damned California sun was there aggressively imposing itself on us yet again.  I am essentially someone who loves the sun, loves light.  The sliding glass doors of my bedroom look out onto a terrace and only the flimsiest gauze drapes can be drawn to prevent intrusive stares, certainly little light is held back.  At night, lights from the courtyard seep through this fabric, competing with the electronic face of my bedside clock, the clock on my Bose radio nearby, the light on the airpurifier that functions as a noise machine nearby, not to mention the light emanating from my bathroom where an illuminated figure of a medieval saint does duty as a night light.  My husband sleeps on the other side of the apartment in a room so heavily masked against the ambient light, sunshine, anything that he must turn lights on whenever he uses the room. A cave, I say.  A normal man's way of living, he says.  Breakfast can be a trial as he will not sit to table until all the requisite blinds have been lowered against the morning sun.  I must agree that his place at the table is facing into the sun, so who am I to object?  I get up very early without an alarm clock, in complete darkness, and hate it, yearning for the days when as I step forth to get the Times on the mat I can luxuriate in the gorgeous, pink, orange, and in between shades of color on the gauzy clouds making their way over the building across from us.  We are on the third floor and what some might find atrocious is the roof of the middle school across the way which to my mind is the perfect aesthetic detail to establish shape and form to the sky view.  Tiepolo could not have done better, ditto with the sunset clouds, from my deck across the roof of the adjoining wing of our condo complex.  How I love the third floor!  How I love looking across the roofs of buildings!  It makes me think of the terrazzo of our apartment in Rome, or the Ionic columned terrace attached to our house in Athens.  How I love the sun!  How I love daylight!  Happy, happy, happy to be in sunny Sarasota.