It is rare that I enter my bedroom during the day. I get up, get ready for the day, and am busy outside of that room All Day until after dark, when the children have long been asleep, and I am getting ready for bed.
There are exceptions, of course. Sunday afternoon naps, my convalescence (which is so rapidly -happily- coming to a close that I will soon refer to it as “recent”), changing clothes for a change of activity. But mostly I am not in my bedroom during the day.
This evening, however, I managed to be there for a while, just around 7:30. I was sitting on the hope chest at the foot of the bed, looking up over the bed and out the windows that are just behind it, and I saw the sun setting.
It wasn’t actually the sunset. I can’t see the sunset, in fact, obscured as it is by the oak trees in our backyard, and further obscured by the oak trees in the yard of our next door neighbors. It was instead a glint of orange light coming through the leaves– first here, then moving slightly with a small wind, appearing again and spreading between leaves, then closing up to pin pricks of orange glow.
The earth moved, and the patch of light grew wider. Orange light broke over branches and past edges of once-green leaves, then was closed up again to let the leaves recover their color. The rosy orange light was shaped like stars. Then the smallest gust of wind. A blue-jay’s cry. More light, more orange light, pushing gently past the edges of the green, green leaves.
The summers I was fifteen and sixteen I watched sunsets like this from the southwest bedroom of my grandparents’ house. Little Peconic Bay is only five minutes’ walk from that window, and so invariably the leaves were stirred with a salty wind. It seems to me that I spent a lot of time those summers caring for my little cousin Ben, and maybe that was why my grandmother was happy to allow me those quiet minutes to sit alone, undisturbed, and watch the light coming through the leaves.
And so I heard the splash of the leaves in the wind, and the gentle clink of dishes in the dishpan, the blue-jay’s cry, and the evening news drifting out the downstairs window.
Tonight I watched the sun making its way through a green veil again, finding space to reach me in clear stars of orange light. It was no distance at all, this space between the sun and my delighted eyes, broken only in the last few feet by the green of the oak trees. And what is 500 miles- the distance between Durham and that quiet house near Little Peconic Bay? It is no distance for the sun to find me here, sitting so like I did all those years ago. And what is 20 years? No time at all, really. A breath of wind in the leaves.
