It Wasn’t Quite Picture Perfect
The foreground was all highway and drab desert scrub, unlit by the sun sinking behind the mountains. The composition was all off; too wide, too many distracting lines and lights. It didn’t fit in the lens. But there, in the middle, was a thin strip, stretching 180 degrees of the horizon. The edge of the mountains was sharper than a perfectly focused image, each layer of mountains made of a color that doesn’t have any good name. And right behind the mountains, the sky was the color of Easter.
For half an hour I watched the horizon as I drove toward it, grieving that I could not capture it, to keep in a folder where I could go back to look whenever I wanted. Then the light was all gone. Was it a gift, after all, the beauty caught in the middle of the ordinary?
