Christmas Clouds

On Christmas Day, I spent a few hours in the kitchen making my most-authentic-I-have-ever-found, i.e., most-closely-resembling-what-I've-eaten-in-Florence, recipe for lasagne pasticciate. It takes between three and four hours, and, no, that doesn't include making your own pasta. I don't do it often, but it had been a very long time since I made it, so that's what we took to my parent's house for Christmas dinner with family. Along with a crostata di mele, something like apple pie, but not so sweet, and the crust is unlike any pie crust I've had here.

We left around 3, which meant we were driving into the sun.

And the road to Searcy does not have many trees along much of it. It's those huge fields, which I wrote about last Christmas, when I witnessed the angels in the form of geese ascending and descending....

So, that meant I was wearing two pair of sunglasses for much of the trip. (I have very sensitive eyes, perhaps fodder for a post unto itself.) Here I was trying to get a picture of that, though I'm not sure you can tell, unless perhaps you enlarge and look very closely, but I don't know that it's worth the effort if you're willing to just take my word for it.


But once the sun eased a little closer to the horizon, I was able to remove the outer pair of glasses, and eventually the other pair as well.

And it was really quite lovely. These photos are taken through the window, of course, but I think they turned out pretty well. Perhaps someday I'll learn to use Photoshop or something, but for now I enjoy taking my best shot and letting it be. I think that's actually a combination of wanting things to stay simple, and also being lazy....

You can see some of the wide fields here, and mostly the clouds, which made me feel I was witnessing an impressionistic artist at work. It made me wish we could listen to Respighi's "Clouds" while we were driving, but, alas, it was not to be found. (I don't think we even have a copy in the house.)