Breaking Through

Christmas lights. Here they are, winning me, as many things more serious seemingly can't do. They lift my heart. If I were my doctor, I'd write a prescription telling me to go out driving every night, to find more and more places coming alight as the days continue toward the holiday. I want to go up to the doors of every house, to thank the people at home there for making the effort, for spending on the electric bill, for these gifts they are giving when they bedeck their homes.

I like colored lights best, a reminder of my childhood, maybe, or just tired of too much white or simply that I was once a colored-lights kind of girl. I think of how my grandfather strung lights around his porch and windows every year, that alone telling me that he couldn't have been as entirely soured on life as he seemed in the days when I knew him.

Really, I love them all. I like it when a virtual palace turns more wondrous with the glow on its lines. Yet, even in Brentwood, it's not always tasteful but still great. There's a big house, on the market for a couple of years, that sold during the summer. It's now a virtual zoo of light-formed creatures. I wish you could see my neighbor's lovely lawn scene: a tableau of snowflakes, white bear, Christmas tree. I don't think they bought it at Walmart. And there's a place I see from the two-way stop on Regent, during the minute before I have to turn right. One of so many ranch houses in Crieve Hall, I'd never notice it or even the tall cedar in the front yard had it not become nothing short of a hallelujah in all colors.

I also love that raindeer that some people on Trousdale set out each year, placed so that it seems to be nibbling on a flower bed, the one that looks exactly like a jackrabbit: something about the ears.

I think that more houses are lit this year. I could be wrong but I wonder. If the year feels kind of dark, if we're fearful of buying the gifts or paying for the flights home, as we enter such a winter, will we light it all the more?

Hey, I'll even take the mall lights. Or the candles in the window of the dirtiest gas station. I love the way Christmas lights transform places--not just the glitter of a single strand of multi-colored lights lining the roof's edge on any battered white cottage inhabited by people I don't know, but also the way they loosen the knots tied tight on all those places I once loved, the ones I can scarcely look at it now, all wrapped up in pain and disillusionment. Somehow, for this month, they are new, almost restored.

There's not all that much I trust of late, especially my own intuitive knowing of anything. Still . . . . all these places, lighting up one by one. It's as if someone had leaned down and kissed each one of them on the head.
posted by Sandy at 8:41 PM