A Sunlit Day

A sunlit day of late winter was passing between brief rainstorms from the Pacific. Earlier that day, as she rode up a valley’s western flank, the bay’s east mountains showed across their crests a lavish blanket of snow. The bright, reflective cover, laid by a string of thunderstorms, spread along the range’s length like a plaid of snowy triangles split by raised edges of rock. Now, the vivid day cast a gentle light in her ground floor apartment. A large arched window held streaks of sunlight as if taut glowing threads had been stretched across the glass. Beside the window, the woman sat writing at a marble table. A pair of black bookcases leaned on a wall near her, the narrow upright structures showing only a few books, all of them new: Borges and Cortazár, in Spanish and English; Dante, Cervantes, Tolstoy, and Dostoevsky, translated recently; one novel each of Gidé, D. H. Lawrence, Dickens, and Hugo. Her favorite was Moby-Dick.