Late Light
There are certain qualities of light that arrive only in the last hour of the afternoon, and only in winter. They do not last, and they do not return.
In December, when the sun is low enough to come through the window at a steep angle, it catches dust in the air that would otherwise go unnoticed. The room fills with a kind of temporary gold. The light arrives at about four in the afternoon and is gone by half past.
I have never found a way to be in this light without thinking about being young.
What light does to time
Memory is not stored the way we imagine it — chronologically, in the order things happened. It is stored associatively, triggered by sensory coincidences: a smell that unlocks a summer twenty years gone, a piece of music that returns you to the back seat of a car you will never ride in again.
Late light in winter is one of these triggers. It does something to the air that the body has learned to associate with the end of things — the end of afternoons, of years, of certain chapters.
I am not sure what to do with this. The light is just light, bouncing off dust particles at a particular angle because of the earth’s axial tilt. There is no meaning in it that was not put there by accumulated afternoons.
But that, I think, is the point. We make meaning out of the repeating things — the light that comes back every December, the way it makes the ordinary room briefly extraordinary, and then lets it go.