People of Cornwall:
hear me! Your home is beautiful!
Since my very first installment of this column in September,
I have mentioned the beauty of Cornwall
several times, albeit briefly. But let me now devote an entire column to
praising the beauty of Penzance and its
surroundings, particularly its skies.
First, in the four months that I have been in Penzance, I
have seen more rainbows than I ever did in my forty-something years in the US. I have seen
them over the stretches of farmland several times, and over St. Michael’s
Mount, sometimes days in a row. On several of those occasions, my four year old
daughter witnessed them with me. I was as excited as she was.
My other fetish is western Cornwall’s cloud activity. Heavenly. The
variety of cloud shapes, sometimes all thrown together at once in the sky, I
had always thought existed only in picture books. Even when those clouds block
out the sun, their purpley-grey wooliness lends a kind of supernatural wonder
to the equation, as though giant sheep were grazing upside down on the ceiling
of the sky. But when the sun breaks through, that’s when the magic really
happens. Occasionally riding an early train in the morning, I must first catch
a pre-sunrise bus into Penzance from St.
Buryan. Sitting on the top level of the bus not only offers the chance to look
directly into the second storey windows of people’s homes, but it gives one a
super-hedgerow vantage point to the sun along the horizon, as it cracks the sky
open like a giant raw egg, splashing golds and pinks all over the place.
Maybe elsewhere I will make mention of Cornwall’s ostentatious starry night skies,
which, without competition from big-city nocturnal lighting, can be glorious.
Have you written your New Year’s resolutions yet? No? Good!
Here’s one you may want to put at the top of your list: less tv, more
sky-watching. Happy New Year, Cornwall!
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