#napkelte

[ID: A mountain in the background has reddish early morning light just on the top half. The foreground is in shadow, with a barn, pasture, chicken coop, and a yard.]

  Dawn comes slowly in the mountains. The Appalachian mountains around me don’t have ‘peaks’, they are just like long, rolling folds in a blanket. This one, Will’s Mountain, runs for miles from Maryland into Pennsylvania. Dawn hits the top of it first, then gradually creeps down. You can see the sunrise from the barn ten or twenty minutes before it reaches the house. Sometimes when the timing was just right I used to enjoy sunrise while I was milking the cow and then see it again when I was at home.

   Today, however, clouds rolled in just after I took this picture. I wanted to get a set of them with the light moving closer!

Looking southeast toward the sun, there was a tiny little glow, then the clouds covered it completely. Then it started spattering rain.