There’s always a line of tall trees, arrayed in the middle distance, sometimes farther. You can see light between the trees, and there always seems to be one larger gap, where the row divides in effect into two and through the gap you see more of the sky, which is more or less a uniform field, sometimes blue, sometimes gray, but most often a bright indistinguishable haze. And this row of trees could be anywhere, it could be outside a high school football field, across the practice field at the edges of a subdivision. It could be at the margins of an industrial park that sits on a flat ridge edged by inadvertently leftover vegetation, including these trees. That in fact is where the row presents itself tonight, in front of a sunset so extinguished there’s hardly any telling west from east. Outside a fish restaurant in Hanover, Maryland, hard by I-95. Such trees remind me, every time, of lonely rows of tall pines along the marshes just behind the shore of the Chesapeake. I guess that’s where we first met. Those pines are the original. They seem to replicate themselves everywhere. It would be tempting to consider them witnesses. However, I believe they are to be witnessed – witnessed as they watch us, and wonder what we do.
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William Van Doren, RAIN CAVERNS (Sunset from Stony Point, Albemarle County, Va.) Oil on watercolor block, 13 x 19.
Monday, September 27, 2010 at 08:24PM | by 
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Twitter Essay
The Effect of Rain on Color.