Blue hour at a flooded lake in early spring, where last year’s reeds and distant birds shape a quiet, in-between moment

You don’t notice the light first here — you notice the sound.

Wind moves through the trees behind you. Water shifts quietly at the edges of the flooded ground. Somewhere out there, across a surface that’s hard to read in the fading light, come the scattered calls of birds — ducks, coots, grebes, swans. Beneath it all, a low, steady murmur: frogs waking after winter.