Spring Dawn, Indiana

Watching the Indiana countryside pass by in the dawn light. Skies pink and blue like a baby's wallpaper, with barely visible tendrils of navy-blue cloud crossing in Indian file, hang over the flat fields, which still exude a luminescent white coating of frost and low morning fog over the straw-brown colour of winter grasses. The fields are neatly tilled with cornrows worthy of a 90s reggae singer, and stretch far away from the highway, and are most often lined with arboreal borders. Tucked away in those trees here and there one can spot a house. I spied one with smoke curling up from a chimney, barely moving in the air, meaning that it must be one of those unusually still mornings which are so pleasant in the countryside. The trees are still bare and spindly from the long winter, and the strengthening light throws them into much sharper relief.

I pass by a tumbledown red barn with a green tiled roof, missing more tiles than it has left. to one side of it, a large, recently-built mansion seems an incongruous sight. Gradually the trees and houses get fewer and farther between, and the fields to each side open up into vast acres of arable land, well irrigated and fertile, waiting for the summer heat to bring up the crops.

At long last, a bright orange orb shows itself above the eastern horizon, dispelling the earlier pink to the edges, and suffusing with the baby blues, turning them into a much darker shade of blue, and adding hints of grey.