Most of the time I forget all about it. I forget about it in the way that you forget Christmas, or what you had for dinner last Wednesday. I forget about it because it is irrelevant. Most of the time.
Most of the time I am up before light, anyway. I make breakfast and bed in the dark. I fold laundry as sleep sits in the back of my brain. I start another load in the cottoned quiet of a silent house.
By the time we leave, we can just begin to see it: the greyness of the new day, sometimes shot through with the early sun. At the traffic light, sometimes I wonder who it is that decides today we’ll have clouds pink just here at their underbellies and gold all around the edges. Or rain.
And then the building takes me in.
Fluorescent light is good for grading papers– and assigning them, for that matter. It is fine for laughing with students, or guiding one through his persuasive argument. It works well for epic heroes and similes, for new vocabulary words and sharpened pencils. I am at ease in its hum and the clock’s ticking, background noise for my head bent over a lesson plan, a stack of papers, a recommendation letter or a student’s heartache.
I confess to forgetting about it in there.
But like so much mercy, it waits. And how? Bottomless blue in the vault of heaven, or cottoned over with white and grey. Striations locked immobile behind a vellum of racing clouds. A storm suspended in steely blue. A solitary hawk, circling. Sky and cloud conspire: they are a net, a scrim, a gauntlet for the light.
And the light is grey, glowering behind a wall of grey cloud. Or the light is bright and uninhibited. Or it has seized the cloud with golden fingers, has wrapped itself around, sends couriers to clasp the flats of leaves, the hoods of cars, the green (such green!) of pine needles. It sidles sideways, licks, paints, sings, sighs, declares with quiet heart that it is Here.
Still here. Still here at the close of a day, at the close of a week. Still here to gloss the trees, to warm the pavement, to pry with nimble fingers at Wonder, sealed up inside my mind.
