A House at Night

The tiny lights of modern life

by

Usually blessed with sleep that begins when I close my eyes, I find a house in the wee hours at once familiar and foreboding. I associate the time from midnight to 4 am with worry about a doctor’s visit or the things that may go wrong on a bicycle camping trip.

Up now at 2:45 am, awakened by a jagged rock in the smooth stream of sleep, I walk my house checking doors, whistling softly to alert the cat, seeing dimly the boulders of an indoor landscape.

Navigating my house at night in near darkness, the benign outline of a favorite chair is revealed in light leaking from a street lamp through venetian blinds.

Tonight, there is an alien presence as I move from room to room. It’s not a new visitation but one I’ll never embrace. Little lights, amber, green, red, piercing blue, sip electrical juice. They are meant to tell me that the power is on, data is flowing, television programs are being recorded; laptops, electronic tablets, smart phones are slumbering with one eye open.

[Read more of Ed Cullen's essays, here.]

Before the little lights, I moved in blackness down the hall. Fingertips found the molding around the bathroom door, next a light switch, then wall thermostat.

Now, stepping from the hall into the kitchen is like crossing a moonless Atchafalaya Basin in the middle of a firefly convention. There are the lights on the coffee maker and the microwave. The microwave clock proclaims “3 am” The coffee maker agrees, but, then, blinks “3:01.” At just past 3 in the morning, I find this exactitude irksome.

A string of lights, a constellation of fat, old-fashioned, red bulbs, wraps itself around our Christmas bush. The bush is trimmed fir branches salvaged from a tree lot and arranged in an antique fire bucket on the hearth. I touch a switch to illuminate the alternative Christmas tree. Its warm, red glow makes me think sleep is possible.

I make my way back down the hall to bed. The hall’s so devoid of light that it slows breathing. I do a dead-reckoning by the light of the electric toothbrush charger in the bathroom, take that last big stride to the side of the bed, and roll in.

Ed Cullen’s wry observations on life in South Louisiana will be familiar to readers of The Advocate, where he worked for forty years. Letter in a Woodpile, a collection of his newspaper and radio essays, was published in 2006.