Seasons of Light and Dark

Sanatorium, Glen Gardner

It's just past the turn of the year, and the world is grey skies and bright windows.  We still need Christmas lights to illuminate the darkness of the walk from the car to the front porch, something to cheer up all those bare tree trunks and stark porches, but the holiday is over, and the lights themselves have become a sort of wistful testimony of neglect, dangling in the chilly air on the deck.

I'm not bouncing back from the hectic holiday season as quickly this year; the world feels darker and colder, I feel more needy. I've been wringing a lot of emotions and experiences onto a slice of time, and I am curled into the spaces in between.  The year is reeling on its edge, and dawn's light is creeping back out from under the grey rock of winter mornings, pale and wan.  During the holiday season, light glimmers, shines, twinkles, forms beacons in the cold inksea of an early December night;  Now it just seems to highlight the dust on the glass.

Older traditions, more sinister and beautiful, used to ache for the change. Beautiful serious star-boys trudging through snow, and girls in red sashes and bearing greenery-bound pyres above their tresses, beckoning the shift towards Spring belong to harsher northern climes, where winter is the guest that may not leave without sacrifices.  We all make sacrifices for the season, whether is cutting cookies til midnight three nights in a row, streams of crushed ribbon listing in every room, exhaustion. 

As manic joy slides to "Watch and Wait for Spring" this year, we crept through the snow to visit the Boy's mother: she feels safer in hospitals, this season, flavorless white halls, quiet listless people with quiet listless relatives, hallways of assurances. A place to blend the joy and black pain of the year to a grey light enough to swallow.  In the fluorescent hallways, glowing against windows of slate January, the contrasting emotions on the Boy's face are highlighted, a chiarascuro of hope and concern, a brief flicker of resentment flashing on the side of his face she can't see.

And then we drive through the rain, headlights cruising disembodied through slashed reflections, toward loud families and roast pig, and shiny dimes cascading,flash of white teeth and laughter, percolating Tagalog.  The Boy feels at home here, a tall pale Boy included in a small, dark tribe of fierce and happy people.  Little old ladies wield machetes and give him the crispy skin and the best rice in banana leaves, and sniff his head and offer him up as a jungle gym for their grandsons.  I wander between the gossiping girls, and fussy gorgious babies, the gambling matriarchs, and fail to feel at home, even with the old soldiers frying lumpia in the kitchen testing home-brewed beer. The afternoon shadows and glistening phragmite stalks, the next day, set against a slowly shifting sky, is almost right, though, even if it's cold enough to be impersonal.

A year ago, on a day like this, Ivan and the Boy and I crept up the cleft between two hills, in a town once named "Sodom", towards an insane asylum.  It was the last thing we had to do before officially becoming the Boy's guardians, and the only place that would take the correct acceptable biometrics to declare our substance and intentions.  We crept up a stairway in the cleft between two buildings, on a frigid day, and held out our hands.  Smudged and marked, we fingerprinted everything that day- letters from the post office, doorhandles, our foreheads.  Marked like criminals and registered at a mental institution, we embarked on parenthood.  

A year once, on a day like this, a Boy arrived in darkness on a doorstep, just before dawn came to investigate.  Some days I can't even remember what the darkness was like, and sometimes I even miss it;  That darkness was sometimes the very realest part of me, whether it started in the stark white walls of another hospital, or in crisp snow of Russia, or bleached rock in the Southwest, or even earlier. 

This past year has been bright; it's been easier to see farther, and more clearly.  I can see a shift in the wind, some oncoming preciptation, the little nervous charge of scudding clouds, as the days unfurl, ever so slightly.  There are a few more shadows, a little more contrast, a little more drama, a lot more balance and depth. I'm glad to be here for it, I like to see the storms approach, and an oncoming front means change.  Peeling a pomegranat for the Boy, tasting the sweet juice of dark and light, I wonder if he misses the darkness like I do, whether it makes him feel like he belongs, whether the memory of that velvet pain ever makes him feel real;  and which of his two worlds, the world of light or the world of darkness, is the one he greets as home.

11:02:10 PM