Beautiful light, beautiful stories, are both loaned fire, borrowed things?

Here, in this photograph, there is the to-the-attic glow of the old house, fighting against the dark of night. The modern car, and the light, and the beauty of the sturdy and lasting house, soothe fears, grant protection: they're boat and harbor, horse and hall.

Is this an important night? The photographer guesses so; she guesses someone has come home after a long absence, and there are stories being told which can't be told over the telephone or on a computer or through any other sort of electronic message. Fear is never however completely conquered here: even the brightness of this house admits that. This house so carefully kept and maintained over a hundred years, now so full of light, suggests also inevitable darkness; just as the car with its newness and readiness which could take you so many places can also take you the driver on long meandering drives, hours of mulling over but never coming to decision.

Perhaps the person who has returned has been away studying, studying for years; but there has come a moment or two when he or she realizes it was all like painting pictures of stars over and over. It's all far away; the better star is the many-windowed house with its quiet winter fire, the car which seems to know its way home, seems to like being parked in front of the house, likes admiring home. Yet adventures are never complete, even when you come home to a real fire: you are never done plotting a course to fairest loyalties, or unfair truths.

Soon this car and other cars will be driven away from the glowing house, and finding one's fortune, as the fairy tales say, will begin again. Finding one's fortune is facing the map and fire and history of stars, the inconquerable distance, and their wobbly sparkling almost-permanence, with humor and daring: facing the tragedy of the dark.

American Rebecca Pyle's photographs go for a dance in The Healing Muse, Belle Ombre, and Dream Noir; her paintings half-waltz and drift in The Menteur, Watershed Review, Alexandria Quarterly, Tayo Magazine, and Permafrost. She's also a writer. Rebecca has lived in Utah the past decade or two; she once studied art and writing at a university in Kansas the Wizard of Oz adored, and Clyde Tombaugh the discoverer of Pluto graduated from, too. In Utah she is surrounded by mountains. Rebecca Pyle's art website is at rebeccapyleartist.com.