Daylight Savings Time ended last weekend and I have been looking for the light ever since.

Until, that is, a moment ago when I remembered the late Saturday afternoon of October 6 which was, for me, the very last moment, the final seconds, of summer. The next day would see high temperatures of only 50 degrees, with gray-filled skies and falling rain. But on that Saturday, the 80-degree air was wondrous, the leaves on the trees were still all green, the lawns too, and there was the sound of children playing.

I had been walking my dog, my Pug, and, knowing the next day's forecast, and what it meant was coming, we stopped intentionally, standing still, soaking it all in with a purpose-to collect every drop of this moment: the warmth, the blue of the sky above the green of the trees, the gentle caress of breezes, and the way small insects were illuminated by the sun like minute stars, savoring my favorite moments of the summer so they could ferment all through the long dark and cold winter, serving up a sip of this memory when the dark is coldest, and the cold is darkest.

The memory of that light is inside me, where the calendar cannot find it.

-JKW-