First Light

The Sunday of Thanksgiving weekend was the first day ice appeared on the pond.

That didn’t deter the heron. It stood as utterly still in the water as it had six months before. The fish were probably stunned the bird was on the hunt on a late November day. Maybe that’s what the heron was counting on to lead to good fishing. The tall, brown, desiccated stems of plants leaned at sharp angles on the shore of the pond. They bobbed up and down, and side to side, in the breeze. They appeared in their movements like nodding older people, telling anyone who is watching they have been through this for months now. Some will stay semi-erect to bounce up and down while poking above the drifts of inevitable snow. There were few birds at the feeder. Maybe the turkeys told them to stay away during Thanksgiving.

It had snowed six inches the night before, a hundred and fifty miles north of here. The Internet reported sales on Black Friday had been less than three-quarters what they had amounted to the year before. A new variant of the COVID-19 virus, first reported in South Africa, was revealed in the press early in the weekend; the Internet news sites couldn’t get enough of it.

The first Advent candle is lit at church. Hope. The Prophet’s Candle. The anniversary of the birth of Jesus seems far away, though. It’s still November. Celebrations with friends and family are over for now. We have almost a month until Christmas. My soul mirrors the landscape: bare, flat, lifeless.

And yet, a close look at the exposed branches of the trees near to the edges of the pond already shows the buds that will burst with leaves and flowers when the warm weather returns. Life is there. Christmas is coming.

Some of us will make the transition to it slowly. We are already in the season of light. Hanukkah began last night. Every Sunday for a while another Advent candle will be lit. We will see more lights outside homes and lit trees inside. The season will get brighter.

More light. More anticipation.

Hope.

-David Downing

[Editor’s Note: Mr. Downing is a friend of the Hammerton and Murphy families, having been a writing instructor at the Charles River Creative Arts Program when Kristin and Rob were school-age children.]