The Same Blue That Might Have

Clear skies  “Nothing but blue skies.”  This is a fine thing, as Josephine Baker sang.  The sky’s blue is sharp, and cold in the way that only a winter sky can be.  Driving with my wife to pick up keys from one person and pick up materials somewhere else.  She is going to instruct thirty different parents at the school, thirty different mothers I am certain, how to make Christmas wreathes. She asked me earlier, “are there any Christmas songs that mention wreathes?”  I couldn’t think of any.  When I looked on line, I found none to mention, either.

It’s a cold day, and most of northern China is heating itself, certainly.  Coal is being burned with vengeance in a hundred million homes.  So what accounts for the blue sky?  Is it the wind that blows down from Mongolia?  Perhaps.  But often that just brings lots of yellow dust.  And it isn’t especially breezy today either. Often it clears up after there’s been precipitation.  But it hasn’t rained in a while.  Maybe the wind such as it is, is blowing north instead of to the east.  I don’t get it barometrically.  But today, the skies if not the air itself strikes one as the same blue that might have gazed down on Kangxi’s Beijing. 

Sitting now at the Doctor, getting a refill, for a prescription.  I was looking for the word “refill” to use in Chinese and then, I couldn’t find it in English either.  I said, “renewal.”  Neither language where it should be.  I can look on line but the only approximation of the word refill is the unruly “chóngxīn tiánchōngle.”  Experience suggests there’s a more efficient way that someone local, pressed for time, would toss out. 

Tomorrow my girls will travel.  Tonight I thought to make a fire.  We buy little bundles of wood for three dollars a bundle.  I have one that I had bought and before long, all to quickly, we’re on to the last log and then down to embers.  It was picturesque while it lasted.  And now its all just ash and smoke sent up into that beautiful clear nighttime sky.