Features
International Conference on GLBT Rights
October Light
Visibly Female, Invisibly Male
October Light
by
Lynn Martin
It
is early October, but already the quality of light has changed. The morning
sun looks ornamental, without warmth. The cold, clear light of autumn,
when every leaf stands out as if to etch itself on memory, is 
not
far away. In the night sky, the big dipper hangs, upright and full, already
thinking of turning over, emptying itself of summer.
Walking through the woods, the green
has changed, it seems overnight, from deep and lush to faded and limp.
Pine needles, golden and russet, litter the paths, suddenly dominant.
"Drink your tea," orders the Towhee. The Blue Jay echoes with
"Do it. Do it," but only the Blue Jay has a permanent sound.
The Towhee seems to be thinking of other things. Light seeps from leaf
to leaf in the gathering afternoon. Darkness creeps up on you silently,
not like in summer when light and dark leaped and cavorted in rushes of
wind.
Is the clarity of light more pronounced
because I am no longer young? Is this the time of life when reaching toward
the sky, I begin to level out, and can't quite fly so high against the
pull of gravity? My children's voices have leveled out to an adult's timbre.
The sound of the four-year-old in my arms is only a memory.
Sometimes, in my dreams, the light
etches every face I have known, those who no longer walk with me in summer,
skin aglow with a reflecting light, called life. What, I wonder, is the
source of that life that burns with such intensity, ebbs, and then appears
to go out? Where does such light go? I imagine turning a corner unexpectedly
some day. The light will be so bright I will know everything I have been
trying to learn inch by painful inch. I will add my own light, and what
was a bare flicker will now be a sun that never goes out.
Lynn Martin observes the change in seasons from her home in Brattleboro.