Queen of the Silver Dollar

Thoreau never missed a sunrise. It was the clearest hour of the day for him. I love the stillness of what the Hindu call the ambrosia hour and the quiet promise of light. Incomplete memories of long ago come back: picking berries on a fall day with my mother on a mountain in Alaska, holding hands on the steep rocks so as not to spill our buckets of fruit. And at times my ears are so keen I think I hear the breath-like lapping of Flathead Lake in summer, where I woke as a child under heavy cotton comforters on my grandma’s sleeping porch.