The lace panels cascaded gracefully down the length of our two living room windows.  When I was a girl, I went into my living room each afternoon just when the light was the softest to practice the piano.  The clusters of broken, patterned light would be strewn across the floor, bending to creep up on Mama’s old coffee table, meandering up to sit upon the burgundy upholstered Duncan Fife sofa and landing on the crème satin painted walls, spreading with stateliness like fine wallpaper.

I loved gazing on that light. I studied it, traced it with my fingers and tried to anticipate where it would travel as the afternoon ebbed.  It was interesting and delicate, soft and inviting.  I sat at the piano with my back to the light as I practiced, and by the time my thirty minutes had passed, the light that flooded my living room had shifted.  It was no longer tracing the path on the floor, on the coffee table, the sofa and wall.  Now a different pattern of light crept more closely toward the piano, blanketing the stool, illuminating a few keys and leaving swirls and broken fragments of sunshine upon the old walnut cabinet of the piano.