Between the Bright Horizons

Once asked to take a picture of my writing desk I pointed the camera outside to the sunrise. In my yard, the sun leaks through the tall hemlock. It floods through the gaps where the soft wood snapped beneath the weight of ice. Limbs crash down every winter. And they are replaced by sunrise in the mornings.

The morning is my writing desk while the afternoon and evening are my reading lamps. I can write immediately upon waking, but I don't. The dogs preclude me from hopping right to it. They need to be fed, let out, fussed over. All is quiet outside save for the huff and grunt of labrador. They scuff across the hard, week-old, snow and chase the scent of rabbit and deer. Tiny prints pressed in slender trails that end at fences. 

On workdays, I steal the time between tending the dogs and a shower and start a blog post or revise a manuscript. During the drive to work and until the moment the workday begins, I write. Even though I am not in front of a computer or clean sheet of paper, I am still writing. More often than not I am driving and prewriting or revising through my eyes and imagination. If it is in the morning, then I am writing. The radio is down or off. And I look and think and imagine. Occasionally I stop and take a picture.

The backroads can be terribly empty during the morning. But it leaves time and space to pull over. And look.

And then I spend my day working with everyone else's writing.

Weekends allow for longer stretches of writing in the morning. The season does not matter. I begin while it is dark. Write through sunrise. And stay with it until the day is stretched out in full brightness like Andrew Wyeth landscape, where the day has chased away most of the evening's shadows and much of what remains are the textures, shadows, and marks of the people we encounter between the bright horizons.

Andrew Wyeth, The Carry, 2003, tempera on panel.

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