So inspiring, so fleeting...

During November, here in the north country, the sun simply gives up on us and leaves, often in exasperation. She doesn't call; she doesn't write. She leaves nothing and so we settle for our memories of her, which we bask in to fend off the depression we feel over what lies in her wake: gray skies and startlingly cold wind.

The obvious consequence to sun's departure is barrenness. The fields are clear, the trees are skeletal, the landscape devoid of mammalian activity. And so we hunker down, hiding from the darkness that barely gives way during the coming days. We keep our heads down to ride it out, as if we're buffering against a bitter wind. Which we are.

And then, late one afternoon, if we're lucky enough to lift our noses from the work that isn't inspiring us anyway, we might catch out the window a color, the likes of which we haven't seen since a June morning when we awoke before the world. It's the color purple and it fills one half of our horizon. It's purple!

And if we're smart, we run from the work that isn't inspiring us anyway and we grab a coat and a hat and gloves and the dog, and we grab the camera running outside to bask in the purple light because we know how quickly purple fades. Like the summer had. And like our lives are. We run and we put our heads down to block out the wind and we find the edge of the purple where we can, for a second or two, see that our sun, our lover, hasn't abandoned us totally. She is there, our heart tells us. She is there our eyes tell us. And for the briefest of moments, purple inspires us.