On a whim…

Light falls across the years; a ribbon that ties together mornings separated by decades.

Here in my kitchen on a quiet Sunday, the coffee not yet poured, I have left the lights off. From the east, the sun filters through late-summer oak leaves and finds its way inside. The beam slants low and sure, almost carrying texture in the air, as though light itself could be brushed with the hand.

And in an instant, I am a child again. I see the narrow blinds of my boyhood window, the sunlight carving bright stripes across the floor, shadow and brilliance arranged like notes of a song I did not yet know how to sing.

What surprises me now is not the memory itself, but its persistence. Across the long arc of living, my gaze has remained tuned to these small alterations of light and dark, to the way illumination lays itself down like a blessing on ordinary spaces. It is as if such moments have bracketed my days—beginning in wonder, and now, in later years, circling back to wonder again.