"Chiaroscuro," One

       I wrote this on a gray day in the San Fernando Valley in California.  It had been raining in various degrees of intensity, it seemed, for days.  The sun peaked out strong for only 15 minutes that afternoon.  Why was I attracted to write about the word chiaroscuro that day?  It is a word I love to try to pronounce . . . key-ARE-o-SKOOR-o will do according to all my sources.  If anything, I should have been interested only in the "oscuro" part of it, which shares its meaning from Italian and thence Latin with our English "obscure"--"dark," "covered," "hidden," "shaded"--like the skies that day.