The morning was bright, the beginning of a warm spring day bringing the promise of life. I stood in the tree’s shadows, aligning myself through the camera’s viewfinder for the best angle. The light was perfect. Shadows fell across the walkway completing the frame begun by the crooked tree branch matching the curve of the distance tree line.

I’ve learned to wait, patiently, watching, for there is always that moment. It’s a constant for photographers. Knowing where to stand, where to look. Observing in a way that can’t be explained. To know the right place. To know the moment will happen. And it always does. This moment was a woman in bright yellow cotton dress.

The spring light filtered across and through the dress. Her dark hair glistened, even in the diffused light through her hat brim. Her arms gathered behind her back at the waist, she smile and spoke “Hello” as she walked toward that moment, that spot on the walkway where composition is perfect. The moment disappeared in black as the shutter opened and the camera viewfinder closed.

It’s a strange twist of fate that photographers never see the moment they’ve recorded. Darkness. A flash of black and the view returns. Only the film, or today the memory card, holds the secret of that ever so brief slice of time. Only after inspection does a photographer know if the moment really existed.

I never saw her again. Most of the people I see walk into the park stroll past at least one more time. She never did. Perhaps she was there only for me, for one of my moments.

The light just inside the woods along the walkway is almost perfect. It comes slightly from the north filtered through leaves and branches, reflected from the pond and the grass and sky and funnels itself to softly fall where the older trees begin. There it fades to dark just as your eyes adjust to the loss of color and depth where shadow’s soft edges are lost in the transition to light in a gentle space just down the path where only a child fears the darkness.

The mosses, leaves and lichens in the moist, cool air at the edge of the canopy saturate themselves in dark color holding tight to anchors of earth and limb. In the fall the small trees growing at the feet of their older relatives join in the splash of bright colors as greens turn to yellow and gold. When blue disappears in the darkness of winter and the time of blue sky is shorter and life sustaining sunlight has to move across more miles of the sky to arrive where earlier there was growth. Now begins brown, soon to be decay to feed next year’s growth.

I stood in the funeral home parking lot during my mother-in-law’s wake to escape the warmth of too many bodies in too small a space and too much emotion in too brief a time. A steady, gentle wind blew across my face and hands and whipped the cuffs of my trousers.

The dry North Dakota air felt pure, having moved across the upper plains, fed by cold shielded from warmth in the earth’s winter penumbra well north of the Tropic of Cancer. My eyes closed, taking deep breaths, I walked across the snow-covered gravel parking lot into the wind refreshing memories of the years I spent there in the military. The dry snow crunched beneath my feet, its desiccated surface a reminder of the death so nearby.

The wind gently caressed me, creating brief eddies across my face and fingers. I remembered the Old Testament scripture when Elijah recognizes the presence of God in a gentle whisper, not in the brilliance of earthquakes, fire and storms.

Family had gathered to celebrate the gentleness of a woman whose tumultuous life never betrayed her love for her children. We stood together, in tears, not afraid to speak of the good things, the moments of congratulations and celebration bequeathed to her children. A gift to pass along to the following generations without condition or regret.

Early winter’s fresh snow near the rock changed the landscape ever so briefly reminding me of that moment, when brothers and sisters, aunt, uncles, nieces and nephews gathered in a place to celebrate a life. We were in that moment of cold between death and resurrection when only memories brighten the day and tears wash away the sadness. It’s a shame it sometimes takes the bitterness of death for us to celebrate the good in people’s lives.