Shadows cross the hills

Here the trees make shadows
over the landscape out past Leaky
on the most beautiful highway in Texas.

By Pat Gibson

Lots of things make shadows. All that's needed is something thick and dark enough to block the light and you have a shadow. It can be a light shadow like a piece of milky plastic makes or a dark shadow like that of a hill or a building.

Things that fly cast shadows but if it is too high, the shadow is too small to see. A jet plane looses its shadow as it goes up higher into the sky. Birds make shadows as they come close to land but you have to be quick to see them. One of the beautiful things I enjoy here above Sulfur Creek is watching the shadows of clouds in the summertime.

On a bright sunny day, you can sit on our balcony and see almost to Lake Travis or at least to the hills close to the lake. I can see clearly from the Shields Ranch to the divide between Barton and Onion Creek by the Double L. The hot days bring what weathermen call 'fair weather cumulus' that we all pray will run together and brings some rain. The most they usually bring is a brief respite from the hot sun.

The hills by July and August are gray-green with an occasional tan field of dry grass or gray of a rock cut. Sometimes the sun is so intense the hills shimmer and you are afraid they are about to burst into flames. When the cumulus clouds are drifting across the sky, you can watch a patchwork of dark and light colors drift back and forth over the hills. When the winds aloft are high, the shadows will race across the hills, dipping and bending to fit the terrain. A passing cloud will come between you and the sun. Your room will suddenly dim and the heat will seem less. If you are lucky, the cloud will be a large one and take a while to pass over. Most of the time however the cloud will fly by with just a flicker of the light.

When the temperature reaches the upper ninety ranges and the air becomes still about three, I like to move out to the balcony and the swing. With a tall glass of ice tea, I'll watch the shadows as they quilt color the hillsides. They make the hills undulate as if children have taken their puppies to bed and are wiggling in play under the covers. The illusion of movement comes with the patches of dimness that chase each other over the hills. Occasionally, one pool of dulled light will creep up out of the valley to pause over my house. As the temperature drops, I wish for it to stay, but it never does. It moves on.

It is nice to think of the heat of summer now that we are in the winter of the year. In the heat of summer it is very hard to think at all, let alone remember the cold of January or February, but that's another story.

Return to Sulfur Creek

Return to Writing by PK Gibson

Return to choose another story