Charles E. Burchfield, Journals, Vol. XVIII, August 19, 1914

I will never get over the great varieties of colors this August sky has. There are few of them pure color! Where the sun sets we have orange red & yellow; but the most of them are weird variations that no artist ever dreamed of. They are all opaque: whence comes the whiteness which is mixed with them? Is it the white mist of day time ascending to the sky?
Barnswallow circles. I am solicitous lest they become entangled in those varicolored threads in the sky
The sound of a train is pregnant with much meaning.
A cicada singing.
A long streak of smoke, from some train, extends in a long line, across the west sky near the horizon. It is a peculiar greenish yellow in color and forms weird combinations with the sky behind it.
I cannot see how August noon & August evening can come in the same day. At noon it is summer. In the evening it is spring or is it fall.
About 9:00 distant rumblings commence in the south. Their insistence proves irresistible, I go down and outdoors. To end of arbor.
Lightning is the same as the wind -- I never know when I have enough of it. It holds one -- we could watch endlessly. Storm in southeast. The same softness that blends the August sky touches the lightning. The livid streaks in the tawny sky are attended by a wonderful hazy glow as if they shoved thru a gauze screen. It is not a haze in the air -- overhead the Milky Way shows plainly. The majesty -- the power of a lightning lit mass of storm-clouds!  It is beyond belief! Each flash lights up those calm- curling clouds with a sort of orange-rose light, with endless variations of color. It seems like some distant wonderland, a thing remote from this earth.
Charles E. Burchfield, August 19, 1914