A moment ago a sunbeam mottled through the neighbor’s trees, casting on the motes dancing mid-air. I remembered

An infant’s fascination with the lit-up stained glass of Nor’easter as she swung in Flip-Away 1-2-3

Awake to stay on Eastern time, camped near Yosemite, sunrise warming trees and ground and air, standing balanced on a stump as everybody slept

Alone in the basement in Devola, the dust fastening on sunlight through the basement window, where toads lived to fascinate a boy as much as lightning bugs and robin’s eggs

Learning the word “mote” in middle school when a friend said he was reading The Mote in God’s Eye, to realize words could be small yet unknown

Lying on the immense yard of Grandview Avenue, staring at the blue sky in search of contrails, watching floaters drift past and return with each blink

Studying Brownian motion, amazed at how much atomic detail can be derived from the close observation of random macroscopic motion

Coding workers in the puzzle game 7 Billion Humans to perform random walks in their tasks, leading to surprisingly highly optimized, though not guaranteed, results

The moment no photo can capture has passed. The sun now lights the trees in the front yard a brilliant summer green. Birds chirp their songs in the cool morning air, cars occasionally pass sounding like surf. A dog barks outside, rousing a dog sleeping belly up on the belly of a sleeping woman. A boy reads on the purple chair, remarks he has theater class but not piano today, asks Can we have pancakes for breakfast?