Light & Dark

On a Saturday afternoon last spring, my son came over to help me clean out the garage. It was something that desperately needed to be done and one of those chores where Mark and I were never on the same page. I always thought we should empty out the entire garage, sweep it, and organize it. Mark would hang a few things up, throw a few things away, then announce his signature line, “Good from far and far from good. Am I right, Kath, or what?” I’d get mad at him and say we hadn’t done anything, he said I was too anal retentive, and the garage remained a craptastic mess.

My son cleans and organizes like me, thorough and ruthless, so we were a good team for this project. It was so humid that day that sweat kept dripping off our foreheads and burning our eyes, but we kept at it, filled a garbage can, and then my car with things we could donate. When everything was cleaned out, and the floor swept of dead leaves and a whole lot of mouse droppings, Will said, “Here’s your problem, Mom, this is why you have mice,” and at the back of the garage where the floor and foundation met you could see a gap where daylight was coming in. Will went to the hardware store and got spray foam, filled in the crack, and we put what we were keeping back into the garage, gently hanging Mark’s bikes on the side walls.

In the last few months I have been thinking of replacing our bed and nightstands. I can’t keep walking into our room and see the place where we both ended our days without a stab to my heart, and one night last week before I went to bed I’d been looking again. I came up with a few options, put my computer away, fell asleep, and started dreaming. In the dream the new bed and nightstands had arrived, and I was vacuuming, cleaning the room, and putting the new bedding on. When it came time to put the lamps on the nightstands and finish everything up, I couldn’t find them. I looked in the other bedrooms and ran down to the basement but the lamps were nowhere to be found. I yelled to Mark asking him if he knew where the lamps were. “Maybe they’re in the closet, ” he yelled back, and I dug through every closet in every room and still couldn’t find them. “Mark,” I said, “it’s so dark in here. This isn’t going to work, there isn’t any light.” He didn’t answer and I was irritated and felt like I’d wasted a bunch of money.

But then Mark called me from the front door to come outside for a minute. Usually that meant there was a bird he wanted me to see, but instead he waved at me from the driveway to follow him, then lifted the garage door and walked towards the back. He crouched down and told me to do the same, and when I did he put his arm around my shoulder. In the space that Will had filled with foam was the tiniest crack of light coming through and Mark said, “Don’t you get it, Kath? It’s the foundation. You have to look at the foundation in order to see the light.” I gasped and smiled, and when I turned my head to look at him he was gone.