An Hour of Light

Two thoughts occur to me while is sit outside my cabin door in the last hour of full light before the sun slips away across the mountains.

First, the glaciers of our last ice age predicted the sunlight would one day find me here.  If not predicted: assured I would one day be here.  The glaciers carved the proper mountain valley, setting aside rounded blue stones, depositing the silted drumlins, and shaping the spring-runs where shooting stars appear early each spring.

My second thought is that you would likely consider worshiping light—as I do—if you were to sit with me in the last hour of full sunlight at my cabin.

Something about how the light comes sifting down to reach my mountain place.  The straight lines of fir and lodgepole pine shadows taking measure along uneven forest floor.  When it finds them, the last light of day ignites a certain fire within elk thistle and red paintbrush.  Some flowers glow so intently you fear touching them might leave you with a burn.

The creek murmuring nearby.

The vaguely sweet scent of lupine filling the warm air.

In this last hour, as the insects twirl upward into the pine whorls, I think of every good day I have spent walking along the nomadic creek.  I think of the last deer I saw bounding across an open park.  I think of everyone who spent more than an hour here with me.

I tell you…the glaciers saw us coming.

Posted today is a photo I captured in the last hour of full light at my cabin.

--Mitchell Hegman