I knew what it was. I have passed it hundreds of times in the three years I’ve lived here in Karthaus. A fence, placed here on the State Game Lands to create a protected area of vegetation from the elk and deer that would feast upon the growing shoots. Weathered posts running along the hillside, strands of wire stretched between them. Fences are ordinary things in this part of Pennsylvania. They divide fields, hold livestock, mark property lines. Most of the time, they are something I look through or photograph around.

But that morning, as the sun broke through the cloud cover, the light caught the dew on the wire and stopped me in my tracks. For a few moments, I stopped calling it anything. The light stretched across the hillside, catching the morning dew on each strand of wire and creating a glow. Nothing about it had changed. It was still wood and wire. Still a boundary. Still a fence.

But I had stopped long enough to see it. The more I look back on that moment, the more one thought imprints itself on my mind: when light illuminates ordinary things, it changes the way we perceive them.

How often do our names for things become substitutes for actually seeing them? We say fence, and once we’ve named it, we assume we know it. Pine tree. Creek. Fog. Cloud. Person. Church. We recognize the category and stop paying attention, thinking we already understand what we are naming. And then the light falls differently.

Might there be people, places, and ordinary parts of our lives that we have already decided we fully understand? We have names for them. Categories and expectations that could limit our understanding. Illumination does not necessarily create something new. Sometimes it simply reveals a depth we had stopped noticing.