Something that you rarely notice about the place in which you live is the light. It’s your living room - yeah the couch is squishy; it’s your bedroom - you do sleep a lot; it’s your kitchen - maybe you should clean the microwave. You get up, you open your blinds (after a generous cup or so of coffee), the weather looks nice and you decide to wear sandals to work. Your commute goes due east and west, and it takes both sun windshield visor and celebrity-on-vacation sunglasses to see the road. You get home, drop your keys and purse and shoes on the way to the couch, close the curtains to cut out the glare of sunset on the tv. Turn on your floor lamps, shut out the moon, sleep to the sounds of a humming fan.
As little as we ever think about it, the light that surrounds us everywhere we are is a key element in forming an impression on our souls of places as a whole. Think again about your living room. The bay window behind your squishy couch frames, between the gray winter stems, a smogless blue of northern sky, making your drab beige wall an exalted Grand Canyon stone. Your bedroom; the blinds let in smooth stripe patterns that dapple your blankets, easing you out of sleep cycle and into reality. Your kitchen; maybe you chose the yellow valance to frame the scanty, geometric squares the house corner lets in to warm your linoleum. You discover that your day follows the patterns of light as it revolves throughout the rooms, without even realizing that’s what is happening.
I think of myself as being almost photosynthetic; if I had lived in a less civilized culture, I probably would have been a sun worshiper. I used to try to be one of the cool literary-nerd kids that love gray days, adore a good storm, wear black all the time, and are happiest when it’s rained for a week and doesn’t show a sign of stopping and they have to row their car down the driveway. I suppose I still do wear a fair amount of black, but mostly for the seek professionalism of it – no longer the type that has to feel like a trapped princess all the time, I finally admitted out loud that I hate the rain, grey days depress me, and some times of the year I just want to move to Italy. Joe Purdy sings, “I love the rain the most…when it stops”, and I agree.
Still, even as “in-tune” as my feelings and moods are with the weather, I never really appreciated light until I began to travel. When I was sixteen I started spending bits of every summer with friends in northern Idaho. When I close my eyes and think of peace, the image that comes into my mind is the golden, tawny, lion’s-mane, sun-drenched Idaho wheat fields. Gleaming and wind blown and so alive I expected them to wake any moment, I can still sit and stare at them with the same awe I felt at sixteen. When I returned to Texas, I was always looking for things that reminded me of those rolling hills. A ditch full of weeds, a driveway framed by spring grasses, the way the tires of a semi trailer made the median plants tremble and wheel – captured by anything that caught the light just so and brought back that particular memory.
Later I moved to the northwest, and saw the sparkling magic of sun on first snow and moonlight through autumn leaves and August shadows on a riverbed, living further from civilization where the land was closer and easier to feel. I traveled to Seattle with friends and treasured the meager, weak warmth of sunshine falling through a leaky skylight in an attic room, the same shine that broke the harbor waves into fitful diamonds and was gone as soon as it came.
I returned home to dramatic Texas, learned to love again the blistering humidity on the cracked asphalt and drying grasses of downtown. Adding a yearly trip to southern California to my schedule, I waded the blue waters of Laguna where the light is clean, blue, tropical and cool, transforming a dirty, overcrowded city like Los Angeles into a thing of unique, hazy beauty. Again, just like with my house, I know the light is there and I revolve around it, but not so much as to put it into words.
In October of 2011 I made my first trip overseas. I spent so much time imagining England over the years (remember the trapped Princess?), having been taught the superiority of the motherland from an early age by such enthusiastic patriots as C.S. Lewis, E. Nesbit, Conan Doyle and Jane Austen, that I found it disappointingly ordinary on first glance. I didn’t want tube stations and tour guides and vintage buses; I wanted round tables and bandits and family manors, towers, dragons and Mr. Knightley. However, as I gradually came to terms with the unrelenting modernity of the United Kingdom (even the name is new-fangled), I also realized it wasn’t just the lack of shining armor that disappointed me. Not for nothing is it called the “rainy island”. It felt like Seattle and Los Angeles combined, without the relief of Laguna waves or harbor diamonds to redeem the gray. Only every few hours, in walking down a crowded pavement, looking out a finger-printed window, in emerging from a breathless underground station, a tiny, fleeting drop of sun would sweep the street like an unexpected gift, and life would be bright again. My trip became a treasure hunt, eagerly seeking out the shy sunshine and recording it. I remember a bright marble Roman ruin in the West, a sunset bus ride down narrow black-and-white shadowed lanes, the glowing central hall of the British Museum with its artificial sky made of ceiling glass, the tilt shift city of Greenwich beneath our feet, a snaking, glowing, moving Inverness river in Scotland, a yellow Hostel box room, a Scottish counterpane unrolling beneath the walls of a gray castle. It was hide-and-seek with the unwilling sunshine, and my camera and I were winning.
Then came Paris. I felt like a neglected child adopted by Santa Clause himself. In a matter of hours I went from the barely-scraping-by of England to this: wide, un-crowded white streets lined with colorful mopeds and shops that gloried in displaying their wares, gleaming, sun-drenched avenues lined with a riot of gold statuary and everywhere I went the wide, shining river mirroring the brilliance of the sky back to it. The bridges felt like space ships, suspended between the sky above and the sky below. The light here wasn’t retiring – it was bestowing, lavish like Versailles or the ridiculous Louvre or the Arc De Triomphe.
Before I took my trip I used to turn the name over and over in my mind – the City of Light. In my head I saw the Eiffel Tower, ablaze with lamps against a black sky. I saw the dome of Notre Dame, glowing with spotlights and shadowed by gargoyles. I envisioned twinkling stars strung from trees, miles of pool-like streetlights, all defiant of old enemy Night, carrying the victory of redemption around the clock. While these are, in fact, all I imagined them to be, I think the Light of which Paris is the city is actually just normal, ordinary, amazing French sunlight. Every building, every street, every bridge is built to capture and display this light, making spaces seem larger and even the most man-made of structures somehow older and closer to the earth. Paris.
After three weeks abroad (and how very grown-up a word that is), I came back to earth; back to gas tanks and always knowing where I am and French fries and credit card bills. Driving home from the airport over unbelievable Texas spaces and wide highways, I felt like the man in the story who travelled all the way around the world to get to his own front door. This familiar sky, these green fields, this sunset orange – these were mine.
Every light has a name. England’s was shy. Paris’ was glorious. Before then, Idaho’s was bountiful, L.A’s healing, Seattle’s surprising. Texas’ is brutally honest. Unbearable , harsh, larger-than life Texas sunshine. It makes my home what it is, sets it apart from every other part of the world. Sometimes it’s unpleasant, but within it my place literally shines. It’s the light that belongs to me, and it is a friend.
*EDIT*
Looking back, this essay really needs photos.
