When I moved to Seattle in 1998, it wasn’t the rain that bothered me. It was the light, or the lack of light, especially in midwinter. (It was a particularly bad winter, the natives told me: an El Niño winter with hard rains. But the winters after that never felt very different, to be honest.) See, all those years in California, I used to time my dinner prep by the setting sun. Then I found myself finishing my Seattle dinners in November by 4:30PM. And oh, I missed the sunlight. There’s a reason Josh calls me a kitty—when the sun’s out I will close my eyes, stretch, turn my face towards the warm light, and all but start grooming myself, it makes me so happy.
It’s taken years for me to adjust to the Northwest light, but I think I got closer to fine this year. We bought full-spectrum light bulbs, and I started using them to help me wake up at my bedside table in the mornings. We painted our living areas sky blue and cheery yellow.
More importantly, the grayer the skies became, the harder I looked for color in my everyday life. Looking back at my photos from this year’s autumn, I can see the patterns that a windstorm will create in the fallen leaves on the ground. I can see how luminous the dahlias are in September, how the pumpkins in October just glow in my daughters’ arms, how the filtered sunlight enlivens the red and yellow maples, just so.
This year’s photos showed me color, light, life. You couldn’t really see how gray and dark the skies had become.
Or, since color is relative, the colors were that much brighter because the skies were so gray and dark.
This year I finally learned the lesson of the solstice: it’s not about raging against the dying of the light. It’s about reaching for as much light as you can, every single day. When mid-December arrives, It’s about welcoming the return of the light, each minute by sunlit minute.
I’ll be back next year. I hope you will too.
(P.S. My essay about my family’s sukiyaki recipe was chosen “a very close second” in Discover Nikkei’s Itadakimasu series. You can read the essay and the generous comments from the Editorial Committee here. Happy New Year, everyone!)