Sights - Light

Snowing Up

   It was early enough in the morning it was still dark. I sat on the couch across from the window seat, wishing our couches hadn't been chosen for comfort. It would be too hard to get up and go to work. I stared into the dark outside, barely lightened by the city-orange street light by our driveway. I think I was praying for help to get through the day, leaning forward to see if the dawn was coming up.
    It was snowing. I couldn't see it in the dark, only in the intangible circle of electric light that existed arbitrarily around the top of the telephone pole. The wind was blowing fiercely then not at all, the white  streaming lines through the light going too fast to see till a moment later, when snowflakes were soft matters of existence that the eye could follow slowly down till it left that circle of visibility. The eye, moving up to catch another snowflake, would watch as they started to move faster and faster, till they were moving sideways, not down. If a white rope had been thrown between the tops of two poles and pulled faster and faster it would not have been more horizontal. I watched, dazzled, as the snow and wind changed everything in that circle, without a pattern. But the crowning moment came when the wind whimsically whirled the white lines up. I stared, unbelieving, as I watched a snowfall going up. I looked outside the streetlight's ascendancy--nothing. Only in the light was that small miracle visible.
    The snow had melted by the time I came back upstairs.

Washing Dishes

    The sun was just outside our kitchen windows as I stood at the sink. The double windows allowed a cool breeze to touch the person cleaning at the sink in the summer, but during the fall and winter days they staid firmly closed. Tonight, less than thirty degrees outside, was one of those times. Our backyard was flat, flat, flat, till ten feet from the end, where we had a gentle slope going upwards. The sun wasn't setting yet, only finishing up the last of its daily duties before it turned the skies into glory. It's light streamed right throw the window, through our kitchen, through our dining room beyond it, past the window seat in our connected living room, through the window pane ti dispel into the cold outside beyond it. It was the golden light that was invisible till something reflected it.
    Washing dishes, I expected the water to be beautiful and diamondlike in the light. But it was too transient, moving through the light and falling before it caught the incandescence. But the glass--the light tan bowls shown as if they had been waxed, the black crockpot held the dignity and power of a true gentleman's tux, even the scratched glasses turned scars into crystals. The clear glass--the wine glass that had held the Sweet-tart balls, the glass bowl that had held the carrots, were turned into frail reflections of breathtaking beauty. I held them as I would hold light, cradled and gentle even as I feared my hands would shake. The small soap bubbles that brushed across them turned into fascinating patterns, swirling in frozen motion or streaming off under the water.
    But walking through the living room, every speck of dust on the black piano turned the instrument of music into a ghost's companion. My computer screen, the laptop turned sideways on our table, had thumbprints and dust on every inch. Electric light made hidden things visible; the sun's setting enchanted household items. If the crockpot was a gentleman, my laptop resembled a sodden drunk.
     I could see the miracle in the streetlight, but by the sun's light I could see the wonder of everyday things, even if I couldn't see the light itself. I tried. The sun, even setting, was too high, too small, and to gold for me to see. The only beauty of the light I was able to see was the beauty that it gave to everything else.

"In him was life, and the life was the light of men. 

The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it."