Thank you to Robert for this prompt from your creative writing class at Yale!
Prompt:
Describe a specific moment of your day by looking out the window and describing in clear, vivid, evocative detail the weather or the play of light (or shadows) on what you see. Don’t make explicit your feeling state, but instead let the way you describe what you see convey what you are experiencing. You may choose a time that is usually meditative—sundown, sunrise, or midnight, for instance—but you may also choose the moment randomly.
The hillside is dappled with shades of red, orange, and yellow, the last few remnants of green struggling to compete. Power lines and gray-white houses are interspersed within the trees. A light blue sky radiates beyond, wispy cirrus clouds extending out from the tops of the highest foliage.
Condensation collects on the bottom half of the windowpane, completely obscuring my view of the street below. The trees move slightly in the breeze.
Wait. I keep looking intently out the window. Never mind.
The leaves of the trees twinkle in place, the branches perfectly still. There is not a breeze to be seen. The movement of the leaves is simply a result of rising morning air, air which has been heated from solar radiation all morning and is now being forced upwards by the colder and thus denser air underneath.
A large fly rests on the window frame, nothing more than a dark speck from my vantage point. I am surprised it has not gone into hibernation or whatever flies do when it gets this cold. Although I suppose the heat radiating from the building provides enough of a respite from the fall chill.
The sun shifts, now reflecting off the rooves of buildings below and directly into the window. The new shine illuminates the condensation, revealing downward streaks where enough water has collected in beads to cascade down in a single stream.
Only the far away houses and the tops of trees give any indication of the world outside, and so, for the time being at least, everything is still. Nothing changes, at least on this timescale. Perhaps, if I sit here long enough, the day will change to night and my view will shift to glowing orbs as the lights within the houses are flicked on to combat the dark. Maybe, if I sit here long enough, I’ll see the cycle from fall to winter to spring to summer and then back to fall again. And if I continue to sit here, I might even see the rise and fall of mankind on this modest hill in the middle of Seattle, the evidence of which can only be extrapolated from a few houses and a collection of trees on a hill.
The completely beautiful, unmoving, inescapably dying trees that hold perfectly still, clutching to the last of their leaves as winter approaches.