Afternoon slipped into evening, sunset hidden behind dark clouds. The night sky flashed bright and beautiful with nature’s own fireworks display. Jagged streaks ripped across the onyx sky.
“No rain or thunder?” Nick asked.
“Nope, we always just call it heat lightning.”
“Man never made anything more beautiful than God’s handy work,” Nick said awestruck. These were simple thing but things he had never noticed or appreciated before. The city had its points but it was man made jungle of concrete and steel any beauty found there was created by man’s hand. He understood now what it meant to be in God’s country. To be helpless and fragile at the mercy of a raw and unyielding nature. He had learned to embrace violence because he had to could he learn to embrace his wild side and live in this wilderness?
Summer slipped quietly into fall with its ever changing uncertainty. Kathy’s moods like the weather ran hot and cold. There was an emptiness, a finality to life and all things living that came with the fall in this far northern region. The brilliant greens of spring grass turned brown by the summer’s unrelenting heat. Summer's colors were replaced by fall's rich crimsons and the brilliant yellow of the birch. The woods bloomed one last time with autumn wildflowers before the white blanket of snow covered them during their winter's sleep.
