Sitting at my window this evening after supper, the sky was a blue-black, deepening into night. Out on the hill, I saw the light of a high tower blinking on and off; below that, there house glowed with light, and below that, the lights of a car flicking through the trees on the hill as it wound its way up to—where? Home, in time for supper? Tick, tick, tick, the lights flickered through the trees, like a stick running along a fence.
Something about the lights in that house, their warmth, their formation—oddly, in a cross shape—glowing in the gathering evening, plunged me back into my own childhood. I had a sense memory, of arriving at someone’s house in Bangladesh when I was very young. The dusk flooded over the hills, the insects sang loud in my ears (as only insects can sing in the tropics), it was warm but not hot. My family and I neared the lights of the house—and the lights of a familiar house at dark are warm beyond description—we knocked, waiting in a moment of expectant silence. And suddenly the door swung open and the good world of just my family on that walk was gone for the good world of being with friends who are like family. That first step into the light out of the evening--into the bosom of a familiar house filled with supper smells where perhaps a small friend your own age waits, and a friend for your sister, and a woman and man who are as old as your parents—it is like stepping out of a cooling bath into a big, warm towel. Somebody wraps you up, and you feel safe and clean and completely at home.
Suddenly, back here in this cold corner of Pennsylvania, Beatrix was asleep. As I stood up to put her in her crib, I was an adult again, and like an adult I understood that the mother and father in the house in my childhood memory was probably scrambling around like mad, tidying up and checking on dinner and perhaps snapping at their kids underfoot. Perhaps that mother thought of political unrest or a sick parent as she stirred the soup. All the while her child waited at the window, watching the dark gathering, waiting for me, her friend, to come up her path.
Is this timelessness, this magic that hangs heavy in the air, for my children too? Holy childhood, where colors ring like music and the sound of a dog barking at nap time calls them into sleep. Holy children, who love without thought of deserving, who are loved before they even know how to articulate love. May my children’s memories be this sweet, this full, this glorious.
