Then the morning comes.

I pull out of the garage and into the morning light. A veil of chilly condensation is still draped over the sleeping cars and lawns. As I turn onto our street, heading east, the sun is low and golden. The city skyline, bathed in rich copper, looks both formidable and ethereal through the slight October haze. Then I take a right, and the scene disappears.

But on the approach to 41st Avenue, the horizon comes back into view, and I catch my breath. Mother Nature has been busy in the last ten minutes. Very busy.

I am in awe.

This is it, I think; the sky that inspired the Homeric epic “rosy-fingered” dawn. It must be. A cosmic wonder of cloud and light play, fanning out across the eastern heavens in their entirety; a glorious riot of blues and creams and rose gold whose beauty the great artists of the Renaissance would have wept to behold.

The sky is doing its best impression of the swirling bands of Jupiter, crossed with a galaxy viewed side-on. The clouds have maneuvered themselves into an intricate display of translucent scrollwork whose every curve and facet glows with a slightly different shade of pastel radiance.

A sprawling horizontal tear in the middle of it all allows the sun to peek through like a giant benevolent eye. The effect is otherworldly and overwhelming in its magnificence.

I remember I should be looking at the road, but only just.

As I merge onto the bridge to Richmond, the tableau is already fading. The ornate cloudscape slowly but inevitably coalesces into two formless grey belts, all their careful detail lost. Only the rift between and the eye remain, the latter now appearing somewhat colder and less kindly than before.

I pull into the office parking lot, stare at the featureless white building where I am to spend the next eight hours, and sigh.