Wires And Weather

 Josie had painted the same field for eleven summers, but this was the first time she let the sky win.   Her teacher back in art school always told her:  subordinate the sky, it’s just a background for the land.  But standing at the fence line that July afternoon, watching a storm build itself out of nothing over the patchwork fields, she understood that she had it backwards.  The clouds weren’t the background.  They were the whole conversation—moody, layered, doing something the tidy squares of yellow and green below could never do.

The telephone poles caught her eye next.  Ordinary things, strung with wire, marching toward the two farmhouses on the ridge like punctuation nobody asked for.  She almost left them out.  Too modern, too unromantic for a pastoral scene.  But that felt like a lie—the wires were there, holding up the sky in their own stubborn way, connecting the little red-roofed house to the bigger one further off, connecting both of them to whatever news traveled down the line that year.

She never did decide if the storm was coming or clearing.  She left it that way on purpose.  Some afternoons in the country don’t resolve themselves—they just hang there, gray and gold at once, while the fields keep growing underneath, indifferent to the weather’s indecision.