Immersed In A Pool Of Light

A pool of light around a desk highlights someone working away on a computer and it feels very homey. It occurs to me to wonder why this is?

I remember coming home from trips as a child and the bright yellow light that lit the landing inside our back door. My parents would bustle us out of the car and, carrying the sleeping ones, shepherd everyone up the stairs and into the kitchen. The house would still be cold, but we’d be so glad to be home.

Even today that shade of yellow, no matter how far away, always heralds feelings of home for me.

Then there were the lights at my grandmother’s house. Bulbs clustered together where old gas lines once were, bouncing off the heavy old oaken woodwork of archways and newel posts and staircase. I would lie awake on my pallet when I visited, looking out into the front hallway and listening to the town clock chime the hour in the distance.

Dim greenish yellow lights in the back hallway, highlighting the dark mahogany of the back staircase and the coat tree chair that stood there holding the dripping raincoats and black umbrellas on cold nights, the personification of winter.

Library lights seeping into dusty old books, pooling around the only phone in the house, keeping the night away when I sat on a handmade oval rag rug and played cards with my uncle while grandma sat in the flickering blue gray light of the living room watching television nearby.

The glass encased reading light my mother hung from my headboard when I was in sixth grade, the water shadows from the aquarium lights in my father’s fish tanks, The fluorescent light framing his head while he made lesson plans, or read late into the night. So many lights working to keep the loneliness at bay, allowing a small oasis for playing and reading and sometimes even writing.

Lights can make me homesick for what is no longer accessible, or they can make me feel at home.