The Light Did Something This Morning

April sixteenth. The light was doing something specific by ten o'clock, and I kept stopping what I was doing to look at it. Not dramatic, not the golden-hour kind of thing I've been chasing with the camera for years now, just that wide, flat, April-morning brightness that comes through the kitchen window and makes everything look like it's been ironed. Gerald caught some of it. The objects on the sill caught some of it. I stood there with my coffee getting lukewarm and didn't mind.

There's a thing that happens in mid-April specifically, not March, which still feels like it's negotiating, and not May, which has already decided, where the light in the apartment shifts into a register I don't have a better word for than patient. It fills the room without insisting. The windowsill arrangement looked different in it. The object placed slightly apart from the others, the one I wrote about putting there in March, it looked less like a decision and more like it had always been there, which might be what a right decision looks like when you give it a few weeks.

The windowsill in April light, every object earning its place.

I made coffee, I sat at the table, I looked at the room for longer than I had any practical reason to. The sketchbook was on the table, I'd left it there the night before, not open, just there, and at one point I thought about drawing the light itself, which is a thing you cannot draw, which is maybe why the camera comes out on mornings like this one instead. One frame of the sill. One from across the room. The kind of photographs I won't be sure are worth keeping until I look at them six months from now.

Saturday morning. Just sitting with it.

The Easter weekend is quiet this year. I talked to my grandmother last week, that long call I mentioned, the kitchen-floor one, and I don't have anywhere to be today. Just this light. Just this apartment, which has gotten very good at being the place where things settle. I think I'm okay with that being the whole morning.