Light Thoughts

She sits in a quiet garden. The morning is suspended in a cool grey which whispers of a mist hanging low over an ocean not far away.

Alone, her eyes gaze at a lantern, weathered and unlit, hanging from the shorn branch of a tree. Her mind moves and memories stir. Memories of days when life was full and the fires of her family hearth burned strong and bright.

A smile walks slowly across her face. She remembers her children in their youthful incarnation and their unstoppable force. She lives through days of travel, of movement and of time where minutes did not merely feel like moments. 

From further afield more distant sirens call. Voices of a childhood half remembered and memories of parents held like pressed flowers with delicate care.

Alone she sits. A still figure wrapped in time. Time which has cut its words of happiness, sorrow and life into the planes of her face. A face now lined as her figure is now bent. Alone but untroubled she gazes at the lantern and thinks of the light.

Sudden voices awake her and she finds herself in the midst of a morning. She turns her head on the pillow and sees her young daughter, eyes wide open, lying beside her with a wide grin. Her son calls from beyond the door. A cool grey dawn awaits outside the shutters and she rises, turning toward the light. 

Image courtesy of Ed Heckerman