Into the light

My earliest memories of coming home include seeing the yellow light in the windows around me and sometimes the silhouettes of those I loved within them.

I remember the lights. The cool white ones, the neon bright ones, the yellow warm ones. Each one symbolic of a feeling, a memory, a place and time that I sat with my siblings on a plastic covered car seat. Warmed by the presence of my litter mates, inhaling the perfume and cigarette smoke of my parents in front of me. Feeling safe and secure and unbelievably content to be exactly where I was.

On the night my husband left me, the night he told me to get a lawyer and divorce him, I left our house and walked along the streets in the white moonlight, looking into the windows of the houses I passed. That light, which had beckoned so warmly to me as a child now spoke to me of loneliness and isolation.

Tonight, twenty years to the month later, I looked up as I walked home from the store. There, not too far ahead of me, were windows filled with the warm yellow light of my childhood.

And I knew I was home.