“This was the first of many delightful days never to be forgotten.” Charles Darwin

“Light is sufficient to itself.” Emily Dickinson

An ode to the light and a meditation on the sadness of forgetting small things.

Clio and I went down to the towpath to listen for green herons. The whole world is green right now — tangled bright green vines and high glowing leaves are reflected in the smooth water to wrap you entirely in tunnels of green light. We found no herons, and we walked back up the slope to the street. It must have rained overnight, and the morning was cool, but you could feel it heating up already, and the dark streets were steaming. And the light streaming down from the mountains through the tall green trees formed such a strange white-gold glow you could feel it like a song. The light in the mornings is killing me lately.

Growing up, late summer was always “hazy, hot, and humid” on the AM radio or on one of the three TV stations we got. The air was bottled refinery smoke, thick and clinging to your skin. But this end of summer, here, has been strangely perfect. The days start out cool and end up cool but warm up in the middle, and you can smell the warming-up rising out of the new-cut grass and the rich dark mud. The bewildering scent of the September clematis, which heralds the beginning and ending of summer, is starting its slow-crawling takeover of the town. The light moves so fast you can feel it … you can feel the hours drift away, the season changing, the days growing shorter. And I spend time every morning in the garden, watching it change.

The light in the mornings is thick and hazy in the bushes, tangible, you could gather handfuls of it and keep them in your pocket for the dark days of winter. The birds’ shadows carve out spaces in the light as they move through the leaves, spaces which linger after they’ve moved on. Everything is green, vividly, poignantly green, ringing with the strange slanting light. It’s a teeming, all-encompassing green, but there are hints of yellow in the leaves. As long as this spate of heart-bothering light has been hanging in our air, it can’t last forever.

Never to be forgotten. How many things do we tell ourselves we will never forget? Will I remember these in-between moments of sitting in the garden watching the light, filling up on it hungrily? So many things in my life I’ve told myself: I won’t forget this, I’ll never forget this, I can’t forget this. The big moments, even, the moments you might catch hold of in a photograph, the moments you might write about — I’ve forgotten so many of those. But the small moments that make up our lives and our moods and our histories, they flow away like water.

With everyone and everything growing and changing and aging at such an absurd pace, it’s not surprising that a change in seasons might evoke some reflection, and the perfection of the light only sets everything on a more piquant knife’s edge. I’ve been searching my mind for memories of the small things — the day-to-day conversations, walks to school, trips to the grocery store. The all-important absurd little nonsense of everyday life. It’s so hard to conjure; it’s like the hazy light, glowing and shifting. It’s that late-summer instant nostalgia, which causes you to miss a moment even as it’s passing. Sadness is probably too strong a word to describe the regret of moments lost. Wistfulness, maybe.

Wistful is, fittingly, not a word that can be easily defined, and the history of it is as vague as light and memory. But it’s likely that it has roots in words that mean closely attentive or longingly pensive. I like the idea of this as a recipe for remembering the little things. I like the idea of being as closely attentive to the in-between times — the not-so-weighty conversations, the shared everyday tasks, dinners cooked and eaten and cleaned away — as Darwin was to the discovery of new (to him) worlds. I like the idea of working to keep these things in focus, even with the knowledge that much of it will be forgotten. But a forgotten moment doesn’t disappear; it joins the hazy white-gold glow that makes us who we are and who we love. What is there in life besides memory and hope?

In America right now, we can only say that the light in this place is so bad. We are in the darkest of dark days. We are in the dark ages. The darkest and evilest of (mostly) men — the worst — are full of some kind of lackadaisical lack of intensity that tells you they know that nobody will stop them or hold them accountable. These are men who don’t know love. They can’t act the way they do and love the people in their life, and by extension, they can’t love others; they don’t know empathy or decency or warmth or kindness. How can they separate families or be complicit in the starvation of children if they’re holding the memory of having lain awake with their own sick child? And you don’t have to have a child of your own to imagine what that might feel like. To empathize. How do you define love besides memory and hope? They’re trying to wipe out our national memory, in museums and books and schools. But they must have no personal memory either, of walks to school, trips to the grocery store, making or eating or cleaning up dinner. They can’t have ever sat in their garden, looking at the glowing, shifting light, thinking about the people they love.

The beautiful light right now is not everything, but it is something. It is a small solace, and I will keep it. J’y tiens.