The sky was blue before you ever saw the sun. The mountain ridges rose high and steep from the narrow valley floor, and it was well into day before its golden orb ever crested the eastern ridge.
On days when it snowed, the world in view was obscured in a powdered descent of gray and shadowed light, the snow coming in a steady fall that powdered the slopes and built up on the brick and cement walks that were the thoroughfares between the village and mountain slope.
If viewed from the base, the evenings were the same, sun descended from sight before the colors in the sky ever turned, but from the mountaintop, it was different. From the top, you saw the colors of the sky filter and turn with the falling of the sun, and when it disappeared, the world cooled fast in the departure of the sky-fire.
While a ridge to the west, in a land absent lights of man, the sky would show with in an infinitude of stars, but from the lit mountaintop, and even more in the village below, the artificial touch of man muted heavens’ glories.
You returned in the dark by the same gondola that brought you up in the sunlight of the day, but it was different in the descent: with the light departed and you fell in slow descent to the ribbon glow of incandescence between two dark ridges that shone as shadows against the stars.
He did not realize he absorbed any of this then, but his eyes witnessed, and mind recorded, all without his knowing and returned to him again in the reading of another’s written memories.
In its rising back to mind—clear and present once again—he wrote it down. He remembered the scene, the time, and the thoughts he kept but did not share from then again.