2020-05-20

branchandroot: empty veranda at dawn (veranda)
2020-05-20 09:35 pm
Entry tags:

Warm white

I've just been down to pick up the post, and I noticed something.

My apartment complex is a quiet one. We tend to value our privacy, our well-planned screening trees, our separate entrances, and we mostly interact with immediate neighbors via a friendly nod in passing or a brief wave when out on porches to watch thunderstorms at the same time. So we don't hold evening sing-alongs or any of the denser urban manifestations of quarantine.

Instead, we are leaving our lights on.

So many of the porches and balconies I passed, almost all of them empty of people now the sun is down and it's getting nippy out, were lit up with strings of lights. A few are blue or red, but most of them are warm white, glowing through the maple leaves and apple blossoms like sign posts: we are here. Like welcomes: so are you.

Completely superfluous lights in the evening, for half a square mile of people out of arm's reach: we are together.