#SOL17: Late Day Light

Linens (2016)

It's mostly about the light--the way the late-day light falls through the back windows of our home.

Hopper light.

And seeing it today brought me back to those years when I tried to explain Hopper light to Rob as we sat on the porch of an old Maine inn. Or that time we sat for hours opposite of Nighthawks at the Art Institute and later braved the cold, cold wind to eat the best Barley soup at Russian Tea Time.

Late Day Light (Reilly, 2010, South Dakota)

Or that time we found ourselves in the Badlands and I looked at where he was pointing and lifted my camera to capture the way light drifts there and then settles. It's always been about the light with Rob since I first saw him sitting in the afternoon class where we met.

Mostly, it's the light today that tugs at my heart, that has me thinking about the man I lost and how that lost feels like a too-big hole.

During Rob's last weeks of life--when he finally came home after so many days lost in hospitals in order to spend his last days with Dev and me, the feel of sunlight amazed him. He would tell our friend Michael and me that it had been so long since he had felt the light.

And the light a year ago was so much like this afternoon. A bit warm. Beautifully thin and so perfect, I could not lower the blinds. I watched as it lit the table and chair as it did the linens on the hospital bed where Rob slept a year ago.