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Sunlight
I’m still a little tired this morning, and poured my second cup of coffee. I must have left it in the kitchen, but I didn’t find it. Not in the microwave. Maybe I left it in the dining room while I was getting ready this morning. Maybe I set it down in the lab. I stomp back to the lab, I think.
There’s a quality of light through stained glass in the morning. Something about dawn, and dew, that adds a kind of clarity to it. A shining edge to the points of light you can only get at daybreak. During the day, the light no longer has that sharpness — colored glass is just colored glass. A few churches I’ve visited in my life, with walls more stained glass than bricks and stone, had this quality. Likely the only reason to have service early in the morning, to capture that strange edge of water and light that somehow reaches into your being. Purples and deep reds that feel like you’re bathing in them. In that light, a funeral makes sense. Comforting. A wedding feels witnessed by the light.
“You left it here” she points to a small table in the green house. Winston Churchill’s words goad me to keep going. I don’t remember having a greenhouse, but it reminds me of the ones my grandparents built alongside their home in Texas. Every room opened to a space filled with bromiliads and orchids, painstakingly cared for by my grandmother.
