ALEXANDER
The light comes first.
Not the cold grey of the treeline or the flat dark of a night march — something warmer than both of those, something that arrives the way mornings do in late summer, unhurried and golden and already full of itself before you’ve had a chance to prepare for it.
I’m standing in a garden.
My garden.
The wide stretch of it behind the main house, where the grass grows longer near the stone wall because the groundskeepers know I never minded, where the old oak in the far corner throws shade wide enough to sit under in the heat of the day.
I know it without looking.
I know it the way you know a place you have etched in your brain for years without realizing — the specific angle of the afternoon light, the smell of the earth, the faint sound of the fountain t
