I visited my friend Tom at 9:00 in the morning. He usually goes to bed at 4:00 or 5:00 am on Friday nights and sleeps in on Saturday, but today, I sent him a text at 8:00 and woke him up. He was happy to see me. We sat on his porch, he opened the birthday present that I had brought him, and then we talked. The rhythm of my voice went up and down, quiet and loud. I talked loudly when I became excited about something and then I quieted myself as I remembered how early it was and how I kept interrupting him, and how lovely it was to sit back and listen to his voice again after so long. His voice, like his hair, golden and deep and slowly flowing, like the essence of honey in bees rumbling through sunlight on cool green leaves.
Later on we went into his backyard where he showed me his pile of industrial scraps from his renovations and his pile of apple scraps from his cider-making. He pulled a white plastic chair into the sun and I lay down on the grass in the shade. We talked about things.
Tom doesn't often see the light at this angle, the light at this time of the day. He found that it had a completely different quality from the light of mid-day or evening. Later on, as the day went by, he felt that the light was staying the same, and that maybe in this season of autumn, when the embers of the year glow before dying into darkness, the golden light of early morning suffuses the entire day.
We have seen three autumns together, and this was the first time that we became aware of this quality of the light.
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