A Wall in the Sun
Someday you will look up and see something so blazingly beautiful that it will knock you over. I don’t know what it will be for you. I expect you feel that way about many very different things. For me it’s what light does to things. Sunlight at different times of day, in different weather, and how at different times of year the light is so different. It could be something terrifically pedestrian, a brick wall – but the sky behind it is that electric blue slashed through by those moody clouds, and the sun on the wall makes it almost seem to burn red. And the air is clear, and damp, and fresh. It can quite literally take my breath away. I want to somehow download the whole experience and forward it to someone who understands. I mean, I want to take it whole and hand it to someone I care about, someone who gets it. And where is that person? Dead. Or drifted away. Or not yet known. Or just, gone. And you may realize that you love it for itself, not for how you would have shared it with someone dear. You may realize that it is yours. You will weep for wanting to share it with that one perfect one, but you will also know that it is yours, you have it, and you will have it as long as you breathe, no matter who comes or goes.
And then, somehow, everything will be all right, even if just for a little while.
When I see something like this, the wall in the sun after the rain, my mind seems to go off like one of those glitter palm fireworks and I think of so many things.
In the Botanic Garden, coming around a curve and seeing a whole hillside of daffodils with the sun behind them. Then years of daffodils: coming home at night and seeing in the window a bunch of daffodils with the light trained on them; pot after pot of daffodils on the kitchen windowsill, bright and then drooping and then fading away completely, and putting them out in the yard, where the squirrels dig them up and re-plant them elsewhere (Squirrels don’t like to eat daffodils. Neither do deer, I hear.) so that you never know quite where some little spot of gold will spring up. A daffodil painted on an Easter egg (along with a bunch of lilacs and tiger lilies – those flowers don’t bloom all at the same time, but on an Easter egg they can.)
Lights in the windows: Paul’s last Christmas. He HAD to have a candle in every window, and of course he wasn’t up to placing them, so he deployed me. It was pretty awful, crawling around on the floor trying to figure out how to make all the wires reach; bringing the entire set of Grove’s Dictionary of Music, each volume wrapped in newspaper (Why? I don’t know. It just HAD to be.) He was very cranky and impatient with me, trying to get me to understand what he wanted me to do. Well, the books were to raise the level of the candles, none on the ground floor, a few in the parlor, and several on the top floor, so they could be seen from the street. And then, how lovely they were! A perfect example of the divide between what is seen and what is actually happening.