Light

 

The waffle clouds glowed orange-pink in the morning sunlight as I sat out front sipping coffee.

Three crows flew in, resting a moment in a tree, then flew off. That felt like a blessing.

Something quietly exploded inside me, not like bombs and disaster, but like fireworks and celebration. A brilliant light of quiet joy opened a channel. Ascension?

A neighbor pulled out of her driveway to take her children to school. She stopped at the entrance to the street where a hole had been dug when the water main broke Sunday evening. She and her 10-year-old daughter got out and took the skeleton resting against a tree and leaned it on the fire hydrant that workers had left in their yard, standing tall on its pipe that had previously been buried in the ground. Later, when I took my walk, I giggled when I saw the skeleton grinning and waving at passersby.

Seeing the young girl doing that with her mother took me back almost 60 years to when my parents were contemplating repainting our house and asked me, an 11- or 12-year-old what color I thought we should paint it. My young girl self felt so proud and mature with that small question that I wrote it in my diary. I had been invited into a small bit of maturity. I wondered if that young neighbor girl also felt a sense of impending maturity in stepping out with her mother to do something silly.

The sky brightened into pastels as I sat on two stacked pallets sipping coffee. Joy and Light continuing to expand inside me as light brightened in front of me. I wandered to the backyard that contains my little gardens and sat watching the sun turn the tops of the trees in the adjoining woods golden.

Ascension.

Joy. Peace. Holy, holy.