Ryan Billington
2-28-06
AP English
Descriptive Essay
Melancholy
Winter’s sky ripples across the horizon. The wind swirls strokes of gray and marble with white, contrasted by threads of blue. While my passions and pastimes are framed in sunshine and warmth, there is a capturing presence carried by this landscape, by nature in winter. The air is flavored with rain and earth, a crispness I taste, I breathe. I feel the tinge of the chilled gusts sweeping across fields that roll and dip with the sky. Pinpricks jump from my skin, and it seems I am standing by the windswept sea as a wave crashes, covering me with the sensation of ten thousand salted icicles sweeping through my skin. A lone tree beckons me to join him in thought and offers a root-broken patch of grass which welcomes my hands, its pale yellow strands scattered amongst a faded green, scant covering over the earthen brown below me. With rough birch bark at my back, I allow my thoughts to be pulled away.
Gray has enveloped nature, a touch of mortality in the strokes of the artist’s brush. Nothing is left unaltered. The leafless trees wave their twigged fingers at a washed blue sky. The brown fields look worn, tired from trudging the length of parallel furrows in a lifelong journey. Even the grass is hidden behind a mist of silver. Faded from the world, death and life come together in season. The air is pregnant with reflection, smelling of good clean soil. Spring abandoned this scene long ago, and Winter feels the pain of its passing, sad sorrow at the loss of an old friend. So he remains: watching, waiting, wistfully longing for the sight of his companion. It seems Winter has grown old and gray and somewhere in this landscape is the wisdom of his thousand years waiting for discovery, hidden behind this curtain of sobriety. Beauty in sobriety, nobility in gray…
A question was asked, “How do I live, how do I act with the knowledge of so much evil in the world?” As one of four seasons lives as a testimony to grayness there is a season of people: people that carry a deep sadness, a wistfulness through life, searching, scanning the horizon for an old friend. A piece of puzzle is missing, a rightness that is gone from the world. They journey along the furrows of life, fulfilled yet knowing this incompleteness, seeing that not all is right. Wholeness is missing until an old friend comes home. It is their service—it is their personality to carry this burden and to be the visual reminder of absence, a reminder of suffering. Beauty in sobriety, nobility in gray…
Backed by the trunk of my companion, I stare at this silver world. Life reveals the life that has left; color reveals the existence of gray.
