First Light, Quehanna Wild Area

In the end, I knew better: I should have just gone ahead and set up my tent. Of course you know what happened next. I spent Saturday night tossing and turning, trying to get comfortable bundled up in my sleeping bag in the back seat of my car. I had brought three sleeping pads along, and my husband had brought three. Since I wasn't using mine, I gave them to him, and he slept in his tent outside, not unlike the princess and the pea, atop the whole stack of SIX sleeping pads.

He did tell me I could come into the tent in the middle of the night and claim my pads if I got sick of the back seat, but moving in felt like too much. I was too lazy. And so I got what I deserved, I guess, which was a somewhat less than restful sleep. At five feet two inches, I kinda sorta mostly fit in the back seat. But even I don't have room to stretch out my legs. And so I awoke from time to time, stretched, and rearranged my small self in the back seat. (At times like this, I am reminded of trite maxims: Lazy is as lazy does. And: You get what you settle for.)

But one of the great things about starting the day inside the car rather than the tent (along with this: almost ZERO time needed to break camp, my friends!) was that I got a fantastic view of sunrise! I never miss a sunrise, if possible. But when you're camping out in a tent, all mummied up in your sleeping bag, you don't always see the light when it comes. From my unusual (for me) vantage point of being in the back seat of the car at dawn, though, overlooking the valleys of the Susquehanna, I was there the moment the first ray of sun hit the Quehanna Wild Area on this morning. And it was a stunning show!

First, just a glimmer. A point of light. A pinkness in the far sky. Some clouds. An early bird or two. And then the light started on the tops of the trees, warming them from tip to toe with its pinkness, turning even the trees that had already lost their leaves and those that were turning brown into a stunning fiery red! It is not the color that they really are, of course. It is a trick of the dawn. After the darkness, dawn light is the Universe's rose-colored glasses: it shows you the world so much better and more beautiful than it ever was, maybe even better than it will ever be. Maybe that is the way it always was; the way it always should be. It gives one hope to carry on.

The soundtrack: a favorite of my mother's (she used to sing it along with the radio), John Conlee, with Rose Colored Glasses. Good morning, Mom; this one's for you! :-)