Summer Light Slanting Toward Autumn

Photo: August afternoon, looking west from Terrace at Remo Mountain

The light from the south-facing window beside my desk has changed its angle and hue. Though it is still August, this day is lit by the sunshine of autumn.

Each corner of the world has its own qualities of light, as I realized when I began to travel. Living in Vancouver, I was struck each time I returned to my hometown by the difference in the light. For me, those long summer evening skies awakened a strange nostalgia.

"Don't the trees look great tonight, like black lace on a fading sky..." While Ian and Sylvia Tyson sang on the radio, I looked down from my student garret at 42nd and Dunbar Street into the bright autumn leaves, and felt a strange longing for the mauve sky of a northern November evening heralding snow.

In France, I witnessed at first hand the light that had inspired my beloved Impressionist painters. Similarly, in Istanbul, Ephesus, Troy and Marmaris, I absorbed the unique Mediterranean light, already so familiar from paintings I'd seen.

From the window of my 11th floor room in the YMCA Kowloon, I watched the rapidity with which a bleached white dawn could transform itself into azure heat. Again in Puerto Vallarta I watched the bright dawn explode behind the palms and absorbed into my very bones the shocking speed of falling dark.

Most of all, perhaps, I love the subtle shadings of light in the temperate zones where I have spent most of my life. Here the shifting angles and colours of light are the welcome harbingers of seasonal change.