Dance in the Streetlight

I sat outside on the front porch this evening, swaddled like a babe 'against the chilled night air. Trying to imagine away the rushing current of cars driving past, I looked up at the stars in all their flaming glory and at a solitary wisp of cloud sailing along the black sea. Distant chimney smoke wafts across the lawn, and a lonely airplane, naught but a starry light, creeps across the sky. I know that up there in that aerial transport people, as large and living and breathing as I, eat, speak, and sleep. But somehow, from earthbound perspective, I just can't fathom that.

 The night is perfectly beautiful, marred by only two things: the traffic noise and a streetlight. Traffic noise can, with willpower and an imagination, be willed away. Yet that orangey hue cannot. It slashes it's way through my picturesque scene like a paper cut through my finger.

Suddenly I am struck by how terrified I have been of those horrid street lights the past few years. They're not the pleasant lamposts one reads of in Narnia; they're the spine-chilling, heart-gripping sort just waiting for action heroes to race through or their nemeses to cower just beyond, gun loaded and cocked. I'd rather trust my (admittedly over-active) imagination to the pitch black than to those menacing lights. But then as I pondered such dismal thoughts -- and, I confess, felt the slightest tremblings within my gut -- a beautiful memory flooded my mind.

I was back in my hometown, in the heart of it, just off Palm Blvd., and I was young. A kindred spirit and I flitted about her front lawn. We were girls one minute and fairies the next. Of course Chloe was a dark fairy; nothing else would do. I was a mixed breed: earth fairy, to suit my infatuation with all things green; water fairy, to excuse my midnight swims; and light fairy, to appease Chloe's insistence that blond hair made it a foregone conclusion. And you now what I did? I danced in a streetlight.

One sat sentinel in the farthest corner of their property, and in my girlhood innocence, I filtered it into our game. I was a queen of the fairies with light exuding from every pore of my elven skin, as the moon in George Bailey's dream. And so the light fell on me and I danced like Tinuviel or Titania. Of course there was an enemy lurking in the shadows; Chloe always was in our fantasies.

As I relived that sliver of childhood with vim and vigor, I stared down that beaming pillar. I stared it down, and slowly all its Bourne-esque ambiance melted, and am eleven year old fairy queen danced before me. I cannot speak for all of humankind, but if one must let loose one's imagination on a lamplight, isn't it nicer to dance in its rays rather than dread its gaze?