What the Sky Sees

In the summer the sky is most times blue. A blue so pure and bright that it hurts to look into it. A blue so deep that if you tip your head back and lose the land from the edges of your vision then you become dizzy and have to hold something to steady yourself, for fear of slipping and falling in. The light which pours from out of this blueness sears everything it reaches, grants beauty where there was none. Anonymous fields of wheat become crowds of ears of grain, stagnant canals and drains become millions of glittering waterdrops, tarmac roads become shattered diamonds placed gently into soft black felt. In the summer, the sky is blue and lifted high, transforming the landscape and the actions of the people who live in it, a shimmering blue silence from which there is no hiding place save beneath the surface of the land.

In the autumn the sky is most times white, a ragged dirty white, and you wonder how this could be the same sky but it is. As the earth turns thick and hard beneath it, the sky seems to be struggling to remain unbroken. Cutting winds come from beyond the horizon, slicing across the land, ripping the sheeted clouds which protect the sky. Slashes of light emerge through these tears, running across the fields like searchlights before vanishing over the horizon and leaving the land as sullen as before. The colours of the earth change, and both landscape and lives turn faces away from the sky in preparation for the cold to come. Fields and ditches prepare coats of fallen leaves for themselves, rivers swell. People who grew up in other places claim they can smell the changing of the seasons, but that means nothing here. All we can smell is the richness of the earth. We know the seasons are changing only by the shape and the colour of the sky, stretched over us from horizon to horizon, the length and breadth of a day.

In the winter the sky is most times grey. A dark and bruising grey. The days shorten, the distance between the horizons shrivels, and what little light seeps down is thick and lifeless. There is no danger of falling into the sky at these times, our bodies and our lives anchored to the ground by the weight of the colour of the light. The earth hides secrets at these times, and the land is silent, save for the shriek of winds which the old people will tell you come all the way from Siberia. Sometimes the drains and the canals will freeze, and be covered in snow, and sometimes these snows will come fast in the night and block the roads so that the landscape is nothing but whiteness, all lines and textures concealed. At times it seems as though the land is giving back light to the sky, begging it to lessen the weight of its greyness and trying to hold off the load.

In the spring the sky is all of these colours, and more. Spring comes gradually here, clusters of bright flowers breaking through the surface of the soil and buds of palest green squeezing out of dry branches while the sky fades to light grey, then white, and finally a faint blue. The air cleanses itself then, with a warm wind from the south and sudden bursts of fresh sparkling rain. The sky lifts away from the ground, the horizons drawing apart to stretch it taut and let space and light flood back into our lives. This is the time when change is a daily force, woodlands smeared green overnight, fields purpled with lavender behind your back. This is the time when the floods come, and the ditches and the barriers have to be built a little deeper and a little higher, and the crops have to be replanted. But still, with all this life bursting up towards the sky, still the earth holds secrets. And still the sky watches.

People who grow up in other places talk about the hills having eyes, but that means nothing here. The land is level here and all we have watching over us is the sky, the ever-present, the always watching. People who grow up having hills to climb and valleys to shelter in think of the sky as neutral, as an emptiness sometimes covered over by clouds, but here the sky is all, arching over our lives.