It isn’t just that there’s been a ton of rain. The sky has been gray for days, sometimes with fat clouds lumbering across, and sometimes it’s like an empty sky-in-waiting: plain dull white, like anything might materialize from it and fall to the earth. More rain. Hail. Snow.

It’s not even November yet and I’m aching for the summer sun.

At nearby University Sand and Gravel there were magnificently rusted tractors and old equipment painted yellow and red. That thing in the middle of tires—what’s it called? A wheel maybe—was screaming to me that it had a greater purpose than holding together some ancient truck. Perhaps it could hold ME together. Until springtime when it’s warm and bright out again. I planted the wheel high in my fabricated landscape to turn it into a sun. Next, I was going to paste in a strip of rocks to create a horizon line and foreground, but the only natural bright light I’d managed to capture in my photo was creeping up from the bottom. I couldn’t bear to cover it up.