Edward Hopper wanted to spend his life painting light hitting the wall. Inside walls, outside walls, some psychic walls. I used to think this was stupid or at the very least bizarre.

But then I've experienced it--light hitting the wall.  Mostly its in the late afternoon when the sun is low in the sky, the way it sends light at an angle through the glass or through the air to hit something as close to dead on as it can before it dips out of sight or turns red and looses steam and just can't turn it on any more.

First, it's "how the hell does it do that?" My mind makes feeble attempts to puzzle out how photons, little electromagnetic particle/wave/don't know who or what they are/ can turn dark into light. Faster than a shadow can fall, I'm exhausted by the effort and the questioning softens into "wow, just look at that." It's gone through the glass, my eyes are singing and I can drop several gritty problems that have bobbed up and down the column of my consciousness, defeating my efforts at  "be here now."

When you live without as much of that as you can get, it takes more than a few days to slip into taking it for granted and the ennui at endless sunshine, I suppose. Before Iowa I lived in Syracuse NY where I made a sport of finding breaks of sun in dense Great Lake clouds. One of the first things I noticed moving here was that it was sunny for entire days and sometimes weeks.

That by long way of saying, I am taking winter coming on alright, mostly by running in the dark along the river, and noticing sun hitting the wall on its daily rounds.