Daybreak

Daybreak: Lake Champlain sunrise through “wavy glass” in late August, summertime slipping through the hourglass. (Source: Geo Davis)

Since my earliest Rosslyn intrigue, wondering if the house and property might one day become a home for us, daybreak was my fixation. Perhaps it was just my lifelong affinity for the early hours. As a “morning lark” dawn has long been my favorite time of time. A world of possibility… Perhaps it was just curiosity what Rosslyn would feel like, look like, wandering room-to-room early in the morning. Although the front hallway was still in decidedly unfinished condition when we first visited, I imagined the walls painted a pale yellow, transporting the sunrise inside, warming the house with the brightening day.

Daybreak Discernment

This summer has been marked with singularly spectacular sunrises (and sunsets), and I’ve written much and often about these liminal states. This morning, however, catching sight of daybreak through wavy glass in the front parlor, I was struck concurrently with two thoughts.

The wave-rippled surface of Lake Champlain was refracting dawn’s beacon, distorting the beam of fiery orange sunlight into a row of burning “puddles” that wavy glass in the parlor windows was further altering into a dancing mirage. Searing reality transformed into a optical illusion. I was reminded that Rosslyn has often altered my way of seeing and experiencing.

These summer days are filtering faster and faster from anticipation to happening to memories. Just as the fleeting illusion of fiery puddles or bonfires or — pushing possibility to it’s breaking point — fiery cairns guided my eye to the rising sun, wobbling up out of Vermont’s Green Mountains like some hallucination, almost as quickly mellowing to a buttery yellow before vanishing altogether in the cloud bank above, just as quickly this summer is reaching its conclusion.

And these bittersweet realizations, as if coupling and procreating, gave birth to a daybreak haiku.

Daybreak Haiku

Daybreak inside out,
sunrise sublime, august hours
tick-tock-ing away.
— @rosslynredux

A window view early on a Sunday morning. A blazing daybreak. Wavy lake and wavy glass. Near, familiar silhouettes framing a veritable mirage. Dawn within. Dawn without.