I do love a bright sunny morning afternoon, when the sun is so intense that everything casts a shadow that looks as if it had been cut out of construction paper, and is there such a term as “bright black?” Because that is what the shadows look like.

Every leaf on every tree is outlined on the ground, by the sun. It’s wonderful. It reminds me of ‘silhouette day’ in kindergarten, when each child would sit in front of a large sheet of paper that was taped to the wall, and a bright light would shine on his/her profile, and the teacher would trace around the child’s shadow and cut it out and mount it on another sheet of contrasting paper and it would be on the classroom wall all the rest of the year and then the child would bring it home and his mother would exclaim over the beauty of her child’s silhouette and put it on the wall in the laundry room next to the outline of the tiny little hand pasted to the paper plate, where it would remain until the child was in her twenties and the silhouette was dried out and flaking away in spots but still beautiful in the eyes of the mother. . . .

But I digress. Outside, the shadows are breathtaking today.

And every seed-pod on every foot-tall blade of grass looks like. . . . oh, wait. Those are only there when the grass is so tall it tries to reproduce from the top down instead of from the roots up.

Oops.

P.S. MY mother still has the kindergarten silhouettes of all four of HER kids. Yeah, we save sweet sentimental things like that. Probably because we love our children so much, we also love everything that represents them, as well.

I look at that tiny little hand on the laundry room wall and remember that when it was first brought home to me, I looked at it and thought her hand would always be that size. Now, I look at that little hand on the wall and it’s hard to remember when it was that small.