And The Year Was Turned

There comes that morning every year when you notice - with something like a start - that the seasons have turned and that either Summer or Winter is really coming back.

That point in the annual round of the Earth about the Sun is said to coincide with the first day of Spring: the midway point between the Winter Solstice and the Vernal Equinox, or sometime in the first week in August for the Southern hemisphere heading away from Winter.

It probably depends upon the time you rise and are up-and-about, but for me this year that point was reached today and around 5:30 am.

Riding from Randburg to Sandton on the early morning Gautrain bus, I've grown used for months to the dark sky outlining the irritating lights of Sandton as we draw near the Centre of Greed. But this morning, as we rounded the corner from William Nicol into Ballyclare - turning East from South - I looked up from my Resident Anti-Hero reverie and saw the Shining City on the Mound of Murdered Lives struggling to outclass the jewel-blue and gold sky of the breaking dawn, backing trees so dark as to be almost black against the brilliant skycloth.
My breath was taken. And the year was turned.

And no, I don't wish I had taken a photo. it's here in my mind, clear and bright and beautiful and unstained.

Photo from photowalkers