Home Lighting Design

Today's prize for lighting design goes to the sixty-foot Oregon Ash trees that surround the highrise that is my home. I spent today luxuriating in my new home, grateful for it, delighted with it. I kicked my feet with pleasure in it. I touched the walls and smiled. Home. Just at this moment in my life I have stumbled across a wonderful novel about finding Home, called A Pigeon and a Boy, by Meir Shalev, translated from the Hebrew by Evan Fallenberg. Here are two pieces of that novel that I want to keep:

"I set out to find myself a home. One that would wrap around me, provide a refuge of sorts. I passed down village lanes stippled with light and shadow and the cooing of turtledoves. I peeped and knocked, I entered local grocery stores and inquired of shoppers.... Like a vulture I soared, scouting after the collapsing, the dying, the dead. I met ruined farmers and couples that had split up. I scoured farmyards of thorns and dust. I drank tea with old people who refused to sell and their children who wished them dead, heard pigeons coo in an abandoned hayloft and winds howl in a breached roof. I saw dreams that had faded away, loves that had been proven false, crumbling cement and cobwebs." (103)

"'What does a person need?'she proclaimed one day after the first spoonful of dessert. 'Not much: something sweet to eat, and a story to tell, and time and space, and gladioluses in a vase, and two friends, and two hilltops, one on which to stand and the other upon which to gaze.'" (21)

I have everything in her list except the gladioli, and I don't need them. I am at home. And I am glad to be at home. Glad that the hurricane on the east coast wasn't as terrible as we feared. Glad to have time to read a novel. Spilling over with gratitude.The New York Times review of this novel is here.