Light

Thinking about light. Micky and I are both drawn to light. We travel to places that have more light than home. Our main hobbies are all outdoors in the light. We enjoy being outside. And we both desparately need to avoid the sun! Micky is so fair-skinned and freckled that sunburn doesn't work out well at all. And I have blister the size of a half-dollar on my right ankle from the sun two days ago. But we all love the sun.

I've really enjoyed the sunsets and the stars here. It's jarring to realize that light takes time to travel. That means that everything we've ever seen was always in the past. From mere nano-seconds in the past, to millions of years in the past. The closer things are the less time it takes for the light to get here. And most of the light we see every day is already thousand of years old before it escapes from the Sun's surface to get here. Sure, it's only about 8 minutes from the time it leaves the surface until it glows up from the bottom of the water here showing us the rays, tarpon, and turtles.

When the sun slides beneath the edge of the planet and the sea darkens to a leaden, rippled sheet, blue-green stars twinkle, not in the sky, but in the warm water sliding under the bridge. In some undeciphered code, tiny shrimp announce to each other their readiness for a reproductive waltz in the swirls.

The stars are next. Their pinpoint, eons-old light shifting position in our thick, hot atmosphere causing them to twinkle. Only the planets are close enough to retain their round disks. All their twinkling is kept to themselves.

Light only takes a little more time to bounce off the moon, but it creates beauty on that trip. Scattering most of the blue out to give us a deep, rusty red ball rolling on the horizon. And after a few minutes, a shimmering ladder of light on the water.