The light on this cloudy November day is silver and stark, giving the world a washed-out look. Just the sort of day Andrew Wyeth would have loved to paint. But then, as I drive south on a dirt road in Lincoln, the light shifts. Sunlight spills through a gap in the clouds and the world transforms from bleak black-and-white to rich color.
Where before I’d been looking at frost-killed fields and the stubs of dead cornstalks, I’m now noticing the orangey light that illuminates the trees lining the road and brings out the greens still in the grass.