TheBanyanTree: The Color of Light

[Sally Larwood]

This is so special. Should it finish with, 'to be continued........'?  I hope so. 

Sal 

Sent from my iPad 

On 02/10/2012, at 2:33, Monique Colver <monique.colver at gmail.com> wrote:

> I tried capturing it in jars, first a Hellman’s mayonnaise, not only rinsed
> out, but scoured, cleaned within an inch of its life. Outside was the crisp
> light of early fall, the trees not yet turning but on the verge. The sky
> bright with free floating dreams, the kind that rarely float close enough
> to catch. I stood underneath the pear tree where the light was subdued, and
> I held up my jar, as high as I could reach, and the light flowed in. It
> filled my jar, stopping just short of the top, a clear bright color with
> the promise of cool nights and fire.
> 
> When I put the lid on the light tried to escape, pushing back against the
> lid while I pushed down, and just a bit of it got out, not much, but more
> than I’d like. I wanted the jar full, so it could last all winter, and nothope so. 
> run out halfway through January.
> 
> I tried a pickle jar, scrubbing the jar first with a scouring paid, and
> though I couldn’t fit my whole hand in I used two fingers, wanting to make
> sure the color of the light wouldn’t be contaminated by any extra pickle
> flavor. I stood next to the house on the first cold crisp day of winter
> when the air was brisk enough to turn my nose red. Instead of holding the
> jar up I swept it next to me, scooping up the light. In the jar the light
> looked white, though it was as clear as the sky. I was stronger this time,
> and sneakier, and before the light knew what was happening the lid was on
> tight. It wasn’t as much light as I had in the mayonnaise jar, but in the
> summer I don’t need as much of the winter light, so it should last me.
> 
> By spring we had moved, and the light I wanted to capture wasn’t available
> at our new place. I had early fall, and the first day of winter, but I
> wanted the spring of where we used to live, not the flat spring of where we
> were living. The spring air where we used to live was full of promises, the
> dreams drifting down close enough to touch before they spun away again,
> light as gossamer, as fragile as a soap bubble. But where we were now,
> there were no dreams floating by, just a flat blankness of space, with no
> color to the light at all. It was as if the color was gone, replaced with
> fallen dreams that crumbled to grey ash in the harsh spring days.
> 
> I didn’t try to save any of it. I wanted no reminders of that spring, and I
> scuttled through the days with my eyes half-closed. Sometimes, but only
> rarely, I would open the Hellman’s jar a tiny bit, just to get an idea of
> fall or winter. This would last an hour or two before fading away again.
> 
> And that summer was the summer I left home, packing up my jars and my
> memories, and heading out of town, walking down the two-lane highway away
> from everyone I had ever known. When I couldn’t walk anymore I stopped, and
> I sat on a boulder twice the size of me, and I put my two jars next to me,
> their colors out-of-place in the heat of the summer. These were cool clear
> colors, not the dry desert colors of where I was now, and I resolved to
> return to those colors.
> 
> The next day they found me though, pulling up alongside me in the wood
> paneled station wagon, calling to me. “Annie, come get in the car.”
> 
> I kept walking, foolishly hoping they would think I was someone else.
> 
> The car stopped then, and my father, a short man with a smile of regret and
> an air of having been done wrong, got out of the car. This was what I had
> feared the most, that he would find me and take me back. But I stopped, and
> turned, and looked at him.
> 
> What I saw on his face was not happiness, but it wasn’t sadness either.
> “Annie, you have to come home now.”
> 
> “I can’t see the color of the air there,” I told him, knowing he wouldn’t
> understand. She would, if she would get out of the car, but she wouldn’t.
> 
> “Foolishness.” He scratched his chin, overgrown with a few days’ of
> stubble, and he stood with his legs slightly apart, ready to run after me
> if I should take to running. Just in case. It had happened before, me
> deciding to run, but I’d learned that no matter how hard I tried, he’d
> always catch up to me, grab my arm, and pull me back towards him so hard
> I’d probably fall, and he wouldn’t catch me.
> 
> “Air doesn’t have a color. Just get in the car.”
> 
> My mother peered out the side window at me, her brow furrowed. She never
> understood why I ran off, though she knew what I meant about the color of
> the air. Sweat glistened on her upper lip, and on her forehead, and I
> walked to the car, thinking of how beautiful she was even as she was
> determined to return me to my prison.
> 
> Towards the end of summer I took an empty jar, this one having held salsa,
> and I scrubbed it clean with the scrub brush my mother kept for the
> potatoes, and when I’d done that I scrubbed the label off, and then I
> scrubbed off all the glue. I wanted it perfect, one perfect jar for the end
> of summer light.
> 
> I walked out at twilight, past the end of the street where there was
> nothing but desert, and I held my jar high, willing in the still desert
> air. The twilight air had more color to it than the daytime air, and the
> briefest glimmer of hope that sparkled like a worn bit of metal that has
> just the slightest bit of life left to it.
> 
> Once the lid was on, keeping in the twilight air so it couldn’t get out, I
> took it home, and I placed it on the shelf next to the fall and the first
> day of winter, and they glimmered together, far off dreams and the present,
> telling me to hold on, that spring would come again, and that next time
> perhaps I could capture it. Next time perhaps I would want to capture it,
> the spring of a new start, the dampness of spring soil waiting for seeds.
> 
> The color of the air glimmering on my shelves, telling me to hold on, that
> new colors were on their way.
> 
> 
> Monique Colver
> An Uncommon Friendship: a memoir of love, mental illness, and friendship
> Now available at
> Amazon<http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss_1?url=search-alias%3Daps&field-keywords=Monique+Colver>
> and
> at www.AnUncommonFriendship.com <http://anuncommonfriendship.com/>
> www.ColverPress.com
> monique.colver at gmail.com
> (425) 772-6218