Living in the Light

I saw the white cottage again this morning on the way to my exercise class. It is on my regular route from my home to the fitness center near the beach, but I hadn't paid any attention to the cottage until I started morning classes. I realized today that the difference is the light, the morning sun shining down on the cottage, the white fence, the overgrown garden, with the brilliant blue ocean and white surf as a backdrop. In the afternoon, the house is really quite ordinary, but in the morning it is magical. I don't have to open the gate or walk through the front door to know, somewhere deep inside of me, that I have seen that cottage, or one very like it, before in some other place and time. I have swept its floors, cooked in a big iron pot, baked hundreds of loaves of crusty bread, and grown herbs and flowers-hollyhocks, morning glories, daisies, roses-in its tiny garden. I have opened the shutters every morning and closed them at night when the winter winds blew strong and a thin layer of ice covered the path. I have spent many hours gazing at the sea, waiting, but for what? I may have been born in that cottage. I may even have died there. I don't know. I may actually be making up the whole scene in my mind, letting my always fertile imagination run wild.

What I do know is that that light has had special significance to me since childhood. It is always morning light. As a little girl, I saw it out my window reflecting off the freshly fallen snow on a winter morning. I saw it again when I first came to San Francisco, bouncing off the pale stucco facades of row upon row of houses in the Marina and off the waters of the bay and the sea beyond. I was drawn to that light and I had to move here.

I saw that light again on the west coast of Ireland on a sunny morning near the summer solstice and still again in Cornwall on a warm day in late May. In each case, all the ingredients were there, the morning sunlight, the white cottage, the overgrown hedges, the flowers, and the sea. I felt that this was home, at some time, in some place.