The Long Record

.I didn’t set out to take a photograph.

I was just walking, the way I always did, when something in the trees caught my eye.

It wasn’t the light, exactly.

Or the way the branches opened.

It was something about how it all came together—like a place that had been there all along, waiting to be noticed.

I didn’t think about settings or composition.

I didn’t know any of that yet.

I just took the picture.

Looking back, I think that was the first time I understood something without having the words for it.

There are things you don’t learn.

You recognize them.

I had lived near that place for ten years.

Walked past it more times than I could count.

And it had never once looked the way it did that day.

The trees hadn’t changed.

The light hadn’t changed.

Something in me had.