Walking home in the warm gloaming, you'd have thought I'd been drinking something other than mild coffee. The straight shots of light from the setting sun slid right through me, opened and lighten me as I walked.
A tree growing between parking lot and street was so illuminated, every seam on its bark so precisely lit ... there was a single sucker, a miniature leaf cluster (one stem, five leaves, the whole thing less than an inch across) right at my shoulder height. I plucked it off and carried it home like a talisman.
