Colours in Winter - Sun Dogs


            You’ve seen it before, haven’t you? Two great shocks of color standing guard over the sun on either side like soldiers or surrounding it like a halo.

            They’re sun dogs. They’re rainbow colored shards that only appear in the sky in the winter and not even all that often during those months. That interesting name, sun dogs, refers to the way these colors follow the sun across the sky like faithful puppies.

            One crisp, sunny winter day, as I headed home from the day’s activities, I happened to glance toward the sky.  I don’t remember why I looked up, but it was a very good thing I did. The sky was a clear, deep, winter blue and the sun glared down from the sky with a blinding brightness, though none of its heat reached us on the ground.

            To the right of the sun, and a bit beneath it, a great feather floated across the sky, vivid and alive with the full spectrum. Reds, oranges, yellows and blues – they were all there. The bird that wore that feather would surely be the most spectacular species on the planet – if it existed.

            Actually, it was a cloud that had the good fortune to be shaped like a massive feather, but the sight was no less amazing for it.

            I continued to watch the spectacle as I walked down the street, pausing every few moments to turn around and see it again. I didn’t want to miss it for a moment.

            I remember a story my Grandmother once told about an afternoon, cold and clear like this one, when she went out cross-country skiing on her farm. This was a favorite winter past time of hers.

            She crossed one of her big fields, untouched this time of year by anyone but herself and the wild creatures. She was free to leave a set of slicked out ski tracks wherever she pleased and expect them to still be there the next time she came back to use them. It just made skiing a lot easier for her.

            She’d made her way over a particular slope in the snow, and as she reached her target, she stopped, breathless. There, in front of her, a bright shock of rainbow colors hovered majestically just over the pristine snow bank, right in front of her. She called it a “snow-bow”. (As opposed to a rainbow.)

 She stared for a long moment, tears in her eyes.

In the present, I thought of all the sun dogs I’d seen as I plodded along the sidewalk, stopping periodically for another check.

Sadly, the life of a sun dog is a relatively brief one. The colors on my feather faded from shockingly vivid to pleasant pastel. Then they disappeared altogether. My feather cloud spread out, morphed, and then also disappeared from view, right about the same time as the colors.

It was all gone even before I got where I was going.

I wished I’d had a camera, but these things never seem to come out even close to their best on film. At least not for me.

Scientists would give us a very clean, laboratory-born explanation for these things. They would tell us about sunlight refracting off of frozen ice particles in the air. And they’d be perfectly correct.

But the rest of us would offer a far simpler explanation: This is simply another one of Mother Nature’s beautiful works of art.

           

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