For our 33 wedding anniversary last Saturday night, TBW and I went to the Longwood Gardens architectural light installations. Beautiful and playful (just like TBW), the nine totally different light displayed amazed me. A couple of their photos from the Longwood Gardens website give you a sense.

If you live within a couple of hours of Philadelphia, you should make the effort to visit the light exhibit this Summer. You won’t ever see anything else like it. The Longwood Gardens have some of the best gardens and garden buildings in the world. Whether climbing around the tree houses like a kid or wandering through the vegetable gardens, I promise you’ll be inspired.

Several of the installations used hundreds of thousands of fiber optic cables and light changers that allowed the light colors to transform. TBW and I were walking on the Forest of Light path (about 1/4 mile through the woods). Most of the folks walked quietly or spoke in hushed, almost reverent tones.

The guy behind us, though, spoke in his normal voice to his girlfriend, telling her about some friend who needed to have lots of trees cut down. He explained that his friend hoped to break even on the deal, since some of the logs would be used for lumber. Then he went on to speculate about whether his friend was getting ripped off. He said, “I mean, these are big trees. Of course, most of them are ash. I mean, there isn’t much demand for ash trees, you know.”

At that point I piped in, “Well, I don’t know. Everybody likes a little piece of ash.” There was silence for a moment than he and his girlfriend and Debby and I just broke up laughing. We didn’t say another word after that. It’s rare in life that just the right phrase comes out at just the right moment.

Here’s a video I made of the lights changing by a lake, you can hear a bull frog croaking in the background.

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N9yiJasX6lU&feature=plcp

I also show a photo of more of the lights. Seriously, you should schedule a visit to see this beauty. Life goes by fast. Schedule in as much beauty as you can.