We Welcome Returning Darkness

It is strange this time around. My circumstances have changed. I live in a tiny house in a different state. A state of being and the state of Michigan. There’s no going back, but yet history seems to circle, around and around, and I shake my head at the irony and wonder: Will things ever change.

Back to the darkness.

It comes early—especially these last couple of days with low clouds and dreary skies.  When I leave work, I walk home in beneath street lights and the occasional light from someone’s window, past the little playground, the spooky abandoned house, and the weird triangle bordered by towering pines. There is a stretch with no lights at all—yet home is not so far. Tonight I’ll remember to put my headlamp into my bag.

And, when I get home to my tiny house, I’ll switch on the overhead and flip a button on the kettle and light a candle in my window and sit in a warmish glow of my own making, and welcome in my November guest.

My November Guest

Robert Frost

 

My sorrow, when she’s here with me,

     Thinks these dark days of autumn rain

Are beautiful as days can be;

She loves the bare, the withered tree;

     She walks the sodden pasture lane.

 

Her pleasure will not let me stay.

     She talks and I am fain to list:

She’s glad the birds are gone away,

She’s glad her simple worsted grey

     Is silver now with clinging mist.

 

The desolate, deserted trees,

     The faded earth, the heavy sky,

The beauties she so truly sees,

She thinks I have no eye for these,

     And vexes me for reason why.

 

Not yesterday I learned to know

     The love of bare November days

Before the coming of the snow,

But it were vain to tell her so,

     And they are better for her praise.