Dark and Light on the Last Day of Yule

What a winter day! 65°F at 5:15 pm on January 5th, the Twelfth Day of Christmas, in East Tennessee - a good thirty degrees higher than normal. Forsythia is blooming, robins are everywhere - it might as well be spring.

But the days still get dark early - it is only a couple of weeks after the solstice and the sun set at 5:36 today, having risen at 7:46. Sure, it's no polar night, but it's a short day, and it was nearly sunset when we left the house to run downtown and pick up a prescription and do a bit of grocery shopping.

The sky was pewter from high clouds, so high that massy, dark storm clouds were underneath them and so too a few wispy white ones. The rain was ending, the wind strengthening, and the sun was very low on the horizon, sitting just over little Haw Ridge at the west end of town. The angle of the sun's rays under the clouds made a striking play of light through the twilight and across the treetops. We were driving down Black Oak Ridge, the big ridge that runs along the north edge of the town, down into the main valley where downtown is, down after several blocks along the back of the ridge before turning down. Just before the turn stands a water tower which is now the home of a huge flock of vultures. While several dozen of them were sitting on the tower, many more - forty at least, maybe fifty or sixty - were flying over the tower and the intersection and the strip of woods running down the ridge between the roads, close together in a flock. They were not very high, circling and circling or soaring in straight lines, or as straight as they could in the strong wind: it tossed them, rocked them side to side, sent them crossways through the air, while the sun caught the light feathers on the underside of their wings, flashing them silver or gold against the dark sky.

The sight of all those huge birds, low in the sky, silently gliding, never flapping a wing, was only a little short of freaky, to be honest. Crows caw and flap as they tumble past, but the buzzards are masters of the wind and part of it, never flustered even when the wind plays rough. So cool.

And then they were behind us, filling the rearview, and we were in the valley. The sun was touching the trees on Haw Ridge, brilliant and blazing in the last moments of light. And there, quite suddenly, luminous against the dark clouds in the east shone a rainbow. At first it wasn't really a bow - a huge, slightly smeary and glowing pillar thrusting upwards from the treeline on Chestnut Ridge, its colors spread out in both directions and echoed faintly to the south with a ghost mirror image. Then, as the sun sank behind Haw, the bow arched swiftly upwards against the dark clouds, running across the sky in a classic and brilliant bow, its leading edge lost behind Black Oak Ridge, shining in the last of the sunlight and then gone.

We went into the pharmacy then, and by the time we got out it was late evening twilight, no sun visible but not hard dark yet. One lone buzzard soared in the sky over Black Oak Ridge, and the water tower was filled with them, huge dark shapes against the pale metal, its green washed to grey in the twilight. As we passed, the last buzzard glided in to rest, and the night closed in.