To the west: sunrise with, (at the top of the frame),  Canada Geese.

When lengthening nights force late-October’s morning chores to start before sunrise, one compensation is the way the job concludes in the new day’s buttery light. This morning, on my way back from the pasture, I saw the early sun’s ochre rays wash across my neighbour’s barn. Like Marcel Proust’s madeleines, the sunrise triggered a rush of memories.

If you’ve grown up around old barns, you’ll likely recall the way the rising and setting sun washes across the gnarly old wood like warm honey. Every knot, crack, and splinter is transformed by the ochre glow. A worn, workaday structure is suddenly, briefly, suffused with beauty. The day seems full of possibility.

Decades ago, as a young university student walking through an Ottawa department store, I glanced at a jumble of boxed Christmas cards on a table. One featured a painting of the classic Ontario bank barn at sunrise. It brought me up short, and I was instantly homesick. I bought the cards to send to my parents and grandparents.

To the east: in the few minutes it took to grab my camera, the light on the boards had changed from glowing gold to washed-out amber.

Now the barns of my youth are gone. So, too are many of the people those cards were sent to. But this morning, I saw the sun light up my neighbour’s barn, and it all came back to me: The childhood promise of a new day, and later, the newly independent kid in the big city, suddenly transfixed by the glow of sunlight on barn board.

I still shop for a card like that every Christmas. I never find one.

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