I’m listening to birds sing the sun down in Shenandoah National Park. It’s my first NP this year and I was pretty stoked cruising in to purchase my annual pass from the entrance gate folks. The young babe there with blond pigtails and a ranger uniform caught my energy in the best way: “I like your tattoos. You look cool,” followed by a genuinely sweet smile. I carried that for most of Skyline Drive.

Every US national park pamphlet discusses origins and “the first people who used” the land, like for resources or vacations or conservation. They rarely talk about the indigenous tribes, and then mostly to appropriate their lore (see: Devil’s Tower, FKA Bear Mountain). Shenandoah National Park, as far as I know, is on Shawandasse Tula and Manahoac land.

I stayed in my friends’ sisters’ family home last night. In a room like a great room with two story ceilings and a wide fireplace chimney bordered by windows and pale yellow walls, there is hung a portrait of a young woman and a little girl on a sandy, grassy beach. The room for all its height feels accessible and well-loved, but the beauty of that artwork needed the space to breathe for sure. The two subjects, tight knit and shuffling among the tall grasses and sand, wear clothes that speak of another time: layers of skirts and blouses blustering about in the sea breeze, also bonnets. Their hair escapes in wisps, aglow in places, the whole painting is doted on by a not-quite-summer kind of sunlight, in which our ladies seem to be telling secrets. They walk tightly together toward the onlooker, possible interloper. In the evening when we arrived it struck me how I’ve seen so many paintings—too many!—as or possibly more glorious than this one, but that this one becomes everything it should be because it isn’t surrounded by others similarly impressive. The work flourishes by not being in among a crowd. Perhaps all art could.

Sunlight streamed through those great room windows in the morning, gracing the still-conspiring duo, and whatever else. I was forced to admit I hadn’t thought the painting could have been more beautiful. I didn’t take a photo of it because it felt sacred then, but now I wish I had.