Article by Make The Days Count Contributor Marie Monroe

 

“How he’d run to meet it, run like wild horses, he’d

say, down the hills to wave to the engineer and

run alongside till he could run no longer …”

 

I became a refugee of a minor sort in the last week or so.  Homeless in a winter blackout and deep-freeze brought on by a major ice storm that fell on the Midwest, I was uprooted like so many of the beautiful trees that have stood watch over this city for generations.  I took sweet, warm, lit shelter with a dear friend who opened her home and her heart to me.

 

The world was at once magical and glorious … frightening and darkly powerful … a fairyland of sparkling, ice-gilded shrubs and grasses and trees - glassy gingerbread fancy along eaves and overhangs, utility lines and cornices.  But nature came to say these ways of my usual comforts are tenuous and superfluous.

 

The temperatures plummeted.  I was armed with flannel, fleece and wool-lined slippers … then more:  wool jackets, mittens and two scarves, the sheltering arms of my warm home grew darkly cold as the precious sun would fade … soon the flashlights I carried about the house grew somehow cold as well.

 

What I noticed when the world, my world of comforts went slipping, were the routines and things taken for granted … what I believed “necessary” in my “orderly” life became not so important … the things not necessary at all, the life not orderly, but routine…

 

Navigating my rooms and their stacks of books became hazardous in the darkness - a tower of well-worn and dog-eared books began to slide here and teeter there - not orderly at all, but simply my comforts in well-lit days of leisure as I rummage through them for a passage … or simply twist and turn far more lithely past them than in my layers and layers of gear with the cumbersome task of lighting my way and walking…

 

My stepfather’s oil lamps sat downstairs in the darkness.  He carried them tenderly for almost 90 years - from his childhood home, a town so sparse it had no name really; just a dot along the railroad track and little more except what nature and hard work would give. Then, leaving his home, he carried those lamps to each place his long life would take him - not breaking or chipping even one in all that time.

 

So, there they sat in my winter storm … in their appointed places, rarely touched since I have known them for fear that after all his years of careful tending something now would break the charm.  Only he could touch them … not at his demand, but at ours.

 

And in the 3^rd day of my darkness, while utility crews came from all over the region to save our souls in the deep freeze of a Midwestern winter, I thought about those lamps, still full of their beautiful red oils, waiting for service, their wicks trimmed and fine and strong, but I left them, even after 5 days of darkness, dying batteries and a receding moon.

 

I left them like the magical lanterns that they are … too precious to touch since his hands have long since faded away, but I thought about them in my darkness.  I thought about the many, many things they must have illuminated:  a childhood and a career in overalls - the train the most wonderful invention, the highest peak of technology to ever come zipping through the sparsely peopled mountains in 1925…

 

How he’d run to meet it, run like wild horses, he’d say, down the hills to wave to the engineer and run alongside till he could run no longer … so he would become the engineer, always looking for barefoot children in the hills and mountains where there were no towns just people … and from the blue patched overalls of his childhood he went racing after the railroad’s stripes and wore them, I believe, with his bib pressed forward, proud…

 

What those lamps have seen, I thought, one dark, TV-less night … one very, very cold night … how they illuminated a little boy’s dreams as he sat feeding wood into the fire, his night to keep his family warm and all he heard in the still, snow-muffled hills was the most beautiful sound in the world:  a train whistle saying hello, hello, hello…

 

That is how he knew the world was large and wondrous and would be his own one day.  And so the lamps sat untouched while batteries died and their flashlights were retired.  Meanwhile, I gave up the fight, retreating to another’s home because the layers of gear and the mountain of blankets began to fail when the temperature dropped some more.

 

I had no faithful child and no wood stove to see me through these nights, but I heard the trains … there are always trains … some graffiti’d by boys in other cities, but still, I’d bet, some chased after by others in in-between places with no names…

 

In almost 90 years of carrying lamps … how much has changed, I thought, listening in the cold, dark night of my winter’s black out.  In almost 90 years of carrying lamps how little has changed, I thought, listening to a faceless engineer saying hello you cold, cold people, hello…

 

All is still well, all will be well…

 

“For some life lasts a short while, but the memories it holds last forever.”
-Laura Swenson

 

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