An Interesting Day….

Friday, May 15 was a very good day for writing (3,251 words between story work and the Daily Writing Exercise), but it was a much better day for observing and taking notes.

It was a pretty typical day at the Carriage Factory Art Gallery. A new exhibit opened on Tuesday and has been very well received in its first week. The opening for this exhibit was Friday night from 7 to 9 p.m. and included a panel discussion by the artists beginning at 7:30 p.m.

The reception and program were very well attended and quite popular, but it’s not what made the evening interesting for me.

It was the weather.

When Neal and I went to Wal-Mart at about 5:30 to pick up the last of the reception supplies, the skies to the northwest looked like this. Towering black clouds rolling in from the northwest (an unusual direction for this part of the country).

Cool as this picture is, it does no justice to the real thing. There was green in those clouds and it was so dark, it looked like early evening (which wasn’t scheduled for another two-and-a-half hours).

It wasn’t raining yet, but it was getting close.

This is the eastern end of this thing. Awesome, isn’t it? In between this picture and the previous one, the clouds stretched across the sky and looked like the bottom of an egg carton. There had been reports of hail in other places and we expected some nastiness, too.

Wichita, 35 miles to the south, was under a tornado warning from this thing, but the skies in that direction actually looked quite tame t what was bearing down on us.

It began raining by the time we drove the mile from Wal-Mart to home and we had to make a mad dash from car to house before the rain really started pelting down. All I could think was that the reception was going to be a bust if the weather kept up.

There is a saying in Kansas, though. If you don’t like the weather, wait five minutes and it’ll change (they say the same thing in Michigan, where I’ve been hearing it for years so neither state is really saying anything unique!).

It proved true on Friday, though it took a little bit longer than five minutes. By the time the program got under way, the sun was shining again and casting the city building across the street in the most gorgeous light.

I just love the light when it looks like this. It’s especially beautiful in the open country, where the gold burnishes every green in grass and foliage and highlights every other plant and ground color on which it falls.

But it’s beautiful in the city, too. Those old brick buildings seen to almost glow in this kind of light. It makes me want to paint. Or write.

Or, since I couldn’t do either of those things because the program was going on, take pictures! The view from the back stairs is spectacular on an evening like this. The water lying on the rooftops creates a ‘landscape’ all it’s own.

I took several images a couple of times as the sun set, then Neal went out and took some more.

I really hated to see the evening end because of the splendor that was going on outside. As good as the current exhibit inside was, it really couldn’t hold a candle to the exhibit taking place outside.