This is from our cabin on Lake Manitoba, taken just a few yards from the house.
I won't forget this night for as long as I live. Sandy was somewhere down the beach with her own camera. The Milky Way was rising in the south. The northern lights were starting to move in the north. And I was in the middle of it, spinning, trying to point my camera at everything at once, half-frantic and completely delighted, because how do you choose between two miracles happening in opposite directions?
I got both, in the end. This is the southern one.
I've been staring at this photo for a while now. What I keep coming back to isn't the Milky Way, exactly - it's the tree.
Because on the right side of this frame is something I know by heart. A tree I walk past every day at the cabin. A tree I've sat under. A tree I've reached up to touch. It's ordinary in the best possible way — familiar, close, summer.
And running right alongside it, close enough that they seem to be in conversation, is a column of light made of two hundred billion stars. Something so old and so far and so vast that my human brain honestly cannot hold the scale of it. I look at it and my mind just kind of… slides off.
The tree and the galaxy, standing side by side. The known and the unknowable. The thing I can touch and the thing I can only tilt my head back and squint at.
And here's what I love most: the stars are looking down. All of them. Every one of those pinpricks of ancient light is, in some cosmic sense, a witness. They see the tree. They see the beach. They see the woman in the middle of a wild, frantic, magical night, spinning between two horizons. They see all of it, and they've been seeing everything like it for a very long time.
I don't think we get many nights like this in a lifetime. The kind that feel like they'll last forever and end far too soon.
I'm so grateful I was able to hit the beach, camera in hand, when this one happened.