I am in a tree house. So it seems. I can look out three walls of windows to the back garden. I am high up. It’s the way the landscape goes, sloping down from street level to the ravine. It’s been raining. Now it gets dark so early. There are exterior spotlights from the house beyond and I can see their reflections on the slice of wet driveway that anchors the hill sloping down to the stream. The windows of the house are stacked one on top of the other for three stories. I can’t see inside but I can tell that there is a lamp casting a red glow as well. Maybe it is on a side table beside a chair. Someone just turned it off.
I wonder if they can see me sitting at my kitchen table, looking, and typing on my computer? The chandelier is from my mother’s house, hanging over what was also her dining room table. Her table is much more casual now, and doesn’t get wiped with vinegar and water once a week by the cleaning lady who came on Tuesdays. Now it sits here covered with daily newspapers, books, a cup of tea with honey, place mats, scattered. The chandelier is reflected five times in the black of the windows. Actually more. Each of the reflections has echoes. It could be a ceiling of magical lights above a dance floor at a very fancy party. There is no music, but I can hear a guitar somewhere, perhaps. There is one leaning against the wall in the other room. Maybe someone will play it. I can see myself as well. Black top, black pants, hair haphazardly tossed in a clip, framed in a dark window, sitting on the very edge of the chair, hmmmmm, like my mother did. She never sat all the way on the chair. Always ready to attend to us at any time, her apron tied with a bow. She tucks her hair tucked behind her beautiful little ears and leans in. One foot curved around the mahogany leg of the chair like a ballerina. There should have been diamonds, and an organza skirt swirling across the dance floor. And, oh, those rows of glass baubles and bulbs in my windows… reflections.
The trees are now almost bare, a few leaves hanging on. I can just see dark branches in the night and the trunks like stoic sculptures, standing in rows of silhouettes because of the windows and their light. There are two buildings and a drive in between and through this nighttime path I can see the yellow-white headlights and the red tails passing by in either direction. A car is coming down the drive. The headlamps flare. A dragon.
Big drops of rain coming now, like the unlikelihood of a platypus readying to jump off the flat roof in to a puddle. There is a scene in Hitchcock’s, Rear Window. Remember? James Stewart. Broken leg. In a wheel chair watching the domestic scenes play out through the windows of the surrounding apartments, as he concocts their stories. What else could he do? I am looking out the picture windows too, at the life stories that are my border. Christmas lights trailing along the trees of a backyard, shifting focus like the turn of a kaleidoscope. I would have chosen all white. Another house illuminated. A party. Lit for royalty. I heard that somewhere. A siren rises and falls. I sense him before I hear the key in the door. Prickles, like the childhood rhyme, ‘criss-cross, applesauce, spiders crawling up your spine, cool breeze, tight squeeze’…. The mandarin patchouli cologne still on his sweater. We bought it together one afternoon. On an afternoon that felt something like love; the body remembers.
I know these windows well. I have observed the passages of light across the day. In the morning the light will break, white before it turns to blue, and although the sunrise is blocked I can feel it through the windows, and a white circle pokes from the trees at some point. It’s as if this lamp that glows at night has been turned on during the day and is projecting, white on white. I can almost hear it; like the buzz through the electrical lines. To my left there is a birdhouse knocked in the bark of the tree with a nail. No birds there. Mostly squirrels. Having a rest or playing hide and seek.
The birds wake with the light as well. Instinct. In the summer the red cardinal starts on the tree. Sits on the iron back of the chair, and perches on the stone seat. Catching the light on its red feathers. Never in one place for very long. It does the same thing everyday. I have learned to watch the light as it passes over and through the garden so that I know where to plant things. I can imagine all this through the dark of the window. The stalks of lavender, peonies in May, hydrangeas turning from green to white, as if the garden is lit, but it’s not lit now; no candles in the lanterns. It is winter, after all, and the chandelier reflects in the dark windows.
