Pinning My Hopes to the Sky

I am penning these words outside, sitting at our deck table. It is mid-evening and a bank of blue-gray clouds are silently filling the sky. The cicadas are chattering; it is still too early in the evening for the crickets and katydids to take over. The pungent scent of basil drifts over from the garden.

It has hit me hard, now the the extreme heat of earlier summer has broken, just how little time I have spent outside this season. It is only in the last two weeks, when the days have stayed in the 80s and the nights have dropped low, that I have ventured back out voluntarily.

I have missed it.

I have missed the calm that wraps around me when I sit out on the deck. Just sitting. Just watching. I have missed the outside noises: the distant hum of a lawnmower, the chittering of the birds. I have missed watching the sun and the moon rise and set.

A few days ago I came out a little later in the evening than tonight. All but the last rays on sunlight had faded, but one lingering shaft lit up a small piece of the sky. I stood in silence for several minutes, watching the light fade out.

When I came inside, I wrote "I walk out and pin my hopes to the patch of light in the cloud covered sky."

As I sit here now, watching the bees work over the rudbeckia, looking at the garden tomatoes spilling onto the patio, listening to the birds wind down their day, I relax. I breathe deeply. And I pin my hopes to the sky.