I knew, of course, that it was coming. At the time, all that sunlight that filled the skies of July and August, and “o’erbrimmed” the horizons of the days and on into autumn, seemed plentiful enough to last forever. I, like everyone else, took it for granted even as it smouldered steadily through the ember months of the year, playing spendthrift until the backsliding of the clocks caught up with me like a bad debt that I was always going to struggle to pay.
Suddenly, I found myself scrabbling around for whatever was left – driving back to Port Talbot I’d notice a thin wedge of grey day sandwiched between clouds over the hills, sunsets over Swansea suddenly became more of a focus point, we seemed to wait around longer and longer each morning for the dawn’s arrival and the garden solar lights dimmed away then flickered out to nothing.
Then, one day, it happens. Stepping out of work after a long afternoon immersed in a steady hundred-watt glare, I feel the shock as I am plunged instantly into darkness. All those familiar sights and landmarks taken for granted throughout the year have simply vanished and become ghosts of themselves, appearing out of the shadows then disappearing back into them as I pass by, half-visions whisked away by the amorphous apparition-plumes of my own breath that drift off into nothingness. So different and yet so much the same, as something seen underwater or a familiar song played in a different key, the world is given back to us anew, in piecemeal portions and street lit slices.
Each house has its own neat rations, boxed up and framed tidily by windows and doorways, some with curtains thrown wide as though to display the stored brightness within, and others cloistered by curtains, jealously guarding their meagre interior brightness. All is frugality, all is reduced and all winds down to the winter solstice, with its shortest day of the year.
But something happens, not just in one or two places, to individual people or even to small groups and communities. As soon as that hour is taken from us, some deep-rooted human instinct flares up and we ready ourselves for the long dark. Traditionally, the fires of Samhain blazed a trail through the end of October to where the oil lamps of Diwali sputter into life in early November, followed by the fireworks of Diwali and Guy Fawkes night that reach skyward, shatter the air into a million colours and look to inject their brilliance back into the blackness. Even as these starbursts are settling back down, the candles of Hanukkah flicker into life just a few weeks later, their nimbus of memory and hopefulness sustaining through until, just as the northern hemisphere reaches is lowest, darkest ebb at solstice-time, the coloured bulbs and twinkling displays of Christmas guide us on through the gloom.
All of these celebrations and their associated sparkle carry their own sense of optimism and wonder but for me, the best and brightest lights are always the simplest. Even from the end of the street, that rectangular glimmer cast out onto the pavement is so different from all others as, rather than being a mystery, it hints at what I know waits inside at the end of my journey: the lamps, lit and waiting, the soft flames of the pillar candles wavering in their sconces and the two people I love most waiting to remind me that I don’t need lanterns and fireworks to get me through winter’s grip. Even in the depth of the very darkest times, all I will ever need, to get to Candlemas and beyond to the vernal equinox and brighter times to come, is the gentle glow of home.
