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Three Days Before the Solstice
Jun. 17th, 2008 12:01 amIt's midnight: the witching hour. It feels like it, too, since we've just watched a David Lynch film, all cuddled up on the floor, propped up on giant hippie pillows and nuzzling under the Our Lady of Batik sarong. I like this house.
It's Kalea's place, technically -- a top-floor flat in one of the taller buildings in town -- but she just got back yesterday. Harry and I have been living here for two weeks already, pottering around in a weird sort of domesticity. He's been my housewife, asking me about my day and offering me cups of tea when I come home from work, making me dinner. He even showed me how to use the washing machine.
From the windows in the kitchen and living room, I can see the roof of the top-floor flat I lived in last summer. It's very close, if one were to fly, but by the roads it's a few minutes' walk, separated by several flights of stairs. Down and then up again. Last summer, when Kalea lived alone in this flat, and I lived mostly alone, or with a succession of mostly-absent, transient flatmates, I thought of us as two eagles, or similar great solitary birds, nesting above the town in its eastern curve (the social and architectural 'top' of the old city, nearest the castle and ruined cathedral), surveying it from our lofty aeries.
In reality, it's only this flat that actually surveys the rooftops of the town. Last year my view was of a sweet little garden on one side, and Younger Hall -- the ugliest building in town, a great hulking monolith chiseled into painfully clashing chunky-victorian and neo-classical styles; the Reichstag of St Andrews -- on the other. It blocked the north side, so, it being summer, we never got to see the sun rise or set.
It does both of these in the north at this time of year. It comes up early in the northeast, swoops up around the southern peak of the sky and then back down into the northwest. Dusk lasts for hours, slowly tapering from a pale blue-grey to a dark one. Looking south, there is some illusion of night, especially if it is cloudy. But looking north, the horizon moves imperceptibly from the last gloom of twilight to the first stirrings of the pre-dawn glow. Even now, in the darkest part of the almost-night, I can see the yellow salvo of the coming morning.
It's Kalea's place, technically -- a top-floor flat in one of the taller buildings in town -- but she just got back yesterday. Harry and I have been living here for two weeks already, pottering around in a weird sort of domesticity. He's been my housewife, asking me about my day and offering me cups of tea when I come home from work, making me dinner. He even showed me how to use the washing machine.
From the windows in the kitchen and living room, I can see the roof of the top-floor flat I lived in last summer. It's very close, if one were to fly, but by the roads it's a few minutes' walk, separated by several flights of stairs. Down and then up again. Last summer, when Kalea lived alone in this flat, and I lived mostly alone, or with a succession of mostly-absent, transient flatmates, I thought of us as two eagles, or similar great solitary birds, nesting above the town in its eastern curve (the social and architectural 'top' of the old city, nearest the castle and ruined cathedral), surveying it from our lofty aeries.
In reality, it's only this flat that actually surveys the rooftops of the town. Last year my view was of a sweet little garden on one side, and Younger Hall -- the ugliest building in town, a great hulking monolith chiseled into painfully clashing chunky-victorian and neo-classical styles; the Reichstag of St Andrews -- on the other. It blocked the north side, so, it being summer, we never got to see the sun rise or set.
It does both of these in the north at this time of year. It comes up early in the northeast, swoops up around the southern peak of the sky and then back down into the northwest. Dusk lasts for hours, slowly tapering from a pale blue-grey to a dark one. Looking south, there is some illusion of night, especially if it is cloudy. But looking north, the horizon moves imperceptibly from the last gloom of twilight to the first stirrings of the pre-dawn glow. Even now, in the darkest part of the almost-night, I can see the yellow salvo of the coming morning.
