Sunday, March 06, 2011
Last Light
This may well be the last one of the season. Getting a good block of ice with reasonable walls needs at least a couple of nights well below freezing and days that don't get above freezing for very long if at all. And, while I don't wish to jinx us, it is March and that's not a likely weather pattern. But I was thinking about these lights and the Christmas lights I see on my early morning walks, burning in the dark for no obvious benefit. Farmyard lights in the lonely stretches of the Great Plains I get - warns off the varmints, stakes a claim - but us city folk, I dunno. There's always enough ambient light that the varmints know who's where and what's what and make their decisions accordingly. But still we leave them on - I sometimes don't light mine up until I'm almost going to bed, so it's not that I'm doing them for my own visual pleasure.
I like to think there's someone walking by who is cheered by it or who looks, insomniac, out the window and sees that no, I am not the last person on earth or if I am, the next to the last guy didn't leave very long ago because a candle outside is going to burn maybe two, three hours tops.
It's like sending Voyager on its way freighted with Bach and math and Chuck Berry and Blind Willy Johnson. If you're out there, here's something I like. If you're not, well then I'm sorry, I sort of hoped you were, but I'd do it again anyway.
If you can light the morning star, why wouldn't you?
