The Light that Fills the World

I think over again my small adventures
My fears, those small ones that seemed so big
For all the vital things I had to get and reach
And yet there is only one great thing
The only thing
To live to see the great day that dawns
And the light that fills the world.
- Unknown Inuit

How often have you missed that one great thing because you just weren't looking closely?

My Dad still owns the same house I grew up in. The vacation cottage is long gone, sold to developers after my first Mom died, but the homestead, as it stands, is still pretty much the same as when I was a child.

The 70's shag carpeting, thank the Lord, is gone however.

Driving in the rental car from the big city, after flying in, I'd head down a street we kids used to run up and down, playing secret agent or soldiers. I would pull into the driveway and it was like going back to another lifetime. The giant motion detector spotlights are still in the driveway (thanks Dad, that went over REAL well with my dates in high school), the fence that my oldest brother knocked over while getting the feel of his drivers license, and the tree my Dad planted while we were in high school growing bigger all the time. Every thing's still there, still the same, and the big picture window, ablaze with light, greeted me with the smile of a trusted friend.


I'll meet my big brother at the house when I could, as he lived nearby, remembering the secret clubhouse we built in his closet, the elaborate train landscapes we'd set up in the garage on a rainy day. We'd share the memories without even speaking of them, as they are woven into the fabric of our lives. Those things we loved as children remain in the domain of our memory, and will, until we cease to breathe. Wherever we are, wherever we live, our souls somehow always hover around the places where we remember mostly happiness.

Walking into the house I could see the marks of our lives there, framed pictures on the wall, things we crafted for our parents when we were just children. Other things, other memories, a cowboy hat perched next to a pair of boots, the deer, shadows lingering on the walls from many a family dinner.

Dad is still in this house, 91 one years old, having outlived all who he has loved with the exception of his children.


Children tend to think of their parents as always having been old. Certainly I was no exception to that. Until I found the photos. There's been a few framed photos of when they were first married, my parents seated on a prim and proper chair that looks about as comfortable as an old Lutheran church pew. Dad's hand is on her knee, not as a brand of ownership, but as confirmation of the look in his eyes.

But then one day, when I was doing some cleaning and organizing at Dads, buried in a drawer, I found a photo album covered with soft brown fabric. In it were the pictures I had never seen, of my parents as children, as teenagers and young adults. He let me take it home to preserve and protect it. It's impossible for our children to imagine us young, just as it was with ourselves and our own parents. I came along very late in their life, adopted when they'd been married 19 years, so my view of my parents was someone conservative, staid, dependable, so the pictures were a joyful revelation.

Who is that woman posing provocatively for the camera? She's giggling because she is, and always would be, innately shy, except around my Dad. Dark auburn hair over one ice blue eye, looking at the camera like a lover come home.


Who is that fellow posing in a sleeping bag with a photo of my Mom by his side surrounded by peanut shells and what looked to be a mug of coffee. That's my Dad, the college student. There are the photos of them before they were married, hiking and fishing, both avid outdoors people. A lifetime in those photos, all of the people in them, except my Dad, long gone. The photos lay there on the table now, expended laughter and corporeal touch; the spent ghosts of voluptuous movements and temporal hearts, captured in a moment of time.

How many times have I been in that house and not really looked at those photos.

We miss so much, as we rush through life, here or there. We race, as if headed south before that first icy blast of winter, race with silent feathering of rigid wing, so driven in that instinctual quest for something, that we miss the perfect sanctuary standing in stark relief against the failing sky. We fly to work, to home, to heartache, with hurried pace, as if we functioned in a steadfast conviction that time was an illusion.

In our flight, we often soar blind, missing cues, missing direction.


The ruined house stood there near my own little farmhouse in the Southern plains, where I lived when I was first married. The newer home likely built right next to it, the owners either too broke or weary to tear it down. You see homes like that, rising gaunt against overgrown thickets, abandoned, left to sky and soil.

I noticed it because of the trees, planted between my house and its remains, the branches now growing though openings in the roof of the original homestead, time and decay dissolving its structure. I ventured in, being careful not to fall through rotten floors, just to take a look at something I'd lived near and never really noticed. The trees however had noticed, the fledgling leaves laying like hands against the roof of the house, the branches jutting into splintered form, rain coming inside, streaming flatly upon the driving air, moving in. Squatters rights. Ruin, mold, rot was evident in everything, yet something caught my eye, a glint. It was a doorknob made of glass, sparking even under the layer of dirt that had settled on everything. Probably a wedding gift from a bride from back East who had came to this house in the 1800's when it was built.

I took it, and cleaned it off and set it where it could be admired. How long had it lay there? A hundred years? 50? I'll never know. Little things, important things, not truly seen.

It was on one of my visits to my Dad years later, that I thought of this again. I was out behind the house, up towards the foothills. My eyes were constantly on the move, for predator, for prey, for places I may stumble and fall. How well though, do I see the world, in what is so familiar to me? A thunderstorm stirred overhead, one rather late for this time of year, when snow was spotting the ground. The air smell of a burnt match, my form creating unpalatable shadows against a stand of trees. There, a flash of light up ahead, a rumble of thunder, the sound not racing away in a flash of its own, but ringing in my ears, as if the sound had congealed in the air, waiting to be found.

I'd best run to the house, the storm was getting too close for comfort, so I took a shortcut, and saw it, not far from the lights of the house. A small, crudely made grave marker, tiny, as if for a small thing, the piece of wood washed clean of words but not thoughts. The memory came to me in a flash of light. A small bird we had found fallen from a nest, injured and attempted to save, the wind whipping its small chirp up and away like a tiny, fragile scrap of cloth against the wind, where only the sky and two small children saw it. My Mom knew well it was futile, but let us try, feeding it with a dropper and keeping it warm. It was to no avail, and Mom tenderly wrapped up it's taut, silent form and laid it in the ground. Laid it away, back behind the house, where we had a small funeral service as I cried as only the innocent can.


How had I forgotten, I thought? I stood there looking, as rain slumbered against my face, enveloping me as sheets of lighting let up the sky, the clouds swollen as if with child, waiting to release life. In my mind, I was still back there at that small moment of my childhood, memories released. In my mind I was not hurrying as an adult, I was running as a child, with the hurried stroke of a piston engine, wet, skinny, tireless, waiting only to get into the house and see my Mom for a hug and warm comfort.

But decades later, as I reached the house, I looked around, REALLY looked around. Yes, there were many things of my Stepmom's. It had been her home for so very long. But she also, having come from a long term good marriage, realized the place in my Dad's heart my mother would always occupy, and as such, left things of my Mom's there in the house, from which we would all draw comfort. There on the little wall by the cabinet, a small plate I'd bought my Mom for Mothers Day with my name on it. On the table a candy dish of my Grandma's, crystal, filled with the candy that we kids liked, but no one else did. On the sofa in the family room, a blanket crocheted with the colors of a sunset, that Mom had made with an antique wooden crochet hook.


Small signs of love, given and maintained. Small strokes of fingers upon slain wood, strumming out inarticulate measures, waiting to be heard. A tree that grows close to a home, its branches breathing against the house upon the infinite air, driving in an open window the forlorn scent of its need. Things not noticed or taken for granted, because no one was looking, signs missed, opportunities wasted. Of small things that bring joy, of love that was always around you and will forever remain, simply waiting for the light that would make you see.

-Brigid