Sometimes I get a compelling urge, an itch, to rearrrange all of the furniture in my livingroom, or bedroom, or office. There are only so many combinations I can make in our mouse house. The bedroom barely fits the queen bed, one dresser, and various shabby pressboard organizers. Most of the time, I’m searching for the best lighting arrangement. But besides the need for more and more illumination, now that my eyes are hardening with age, what’s behind this compulsion to change things around?
Making Room for Light
Dylan Thomas famously urged his ailing father to
"rage against the dying of the light" -- and now I
understand more concretely what he might have
meant: my lenses grow hard and cloudy, the world
darkens, faces flatten into silhouettes against a
relentless sun, and text eventually fades into watery echoes
no matter how I move the dull pages back and forth,
up and down, chasing the meaning into hungry shadows.
Glasses can't brighten the edges of things, or pull me
into focus. In this purgatory, what light there is
either blinds or oozes brown in mocking globules
at the edges of my vision.
It's no wonder women of a certain age struggle
to bottle their increasing frustration, depression,
confusion, and rage. Some days, I'd like to punch
the world in its flat black ignorant face.
Last night, determined to climb into bed with
my book and read my tired mind into oblivion,
I moved two bright lamps into the bedroom,
propped myself up with a mountain of pillows,
put on anti-glare specs, and flipped open
a thriller. The characters jumped into fast boats,
fell into deep water, swam out and hiked into
cold woods, doing their best to escape their
armed pursuers, hiding from the moonlight, while I
waved their book under my old eyes, searching
for the sweet spot of mellow white in all that
encroaching night.
