The most optimistic light

Fairy lights // WEEK TWENTY-FIVE

As we begin to live with light, no matter how little.

I want to tell you about a tree.

It wasn’t really a tree. It was sticks. Found sticks, gathered and tied with string into the shape of a tree, stood in a corner of a house where almost nothing else was yet.

Our belongings were somewhere on a ship. Our life was somewhere between the country we had left and the country we had arrived in. It was our first Christmas in New Zealand, and we were making do.

I wound fairy lights around the sticks. And then I stepped back, and I looked at what we had made, and I thought: this is enough.

This is more than enough.

This is, in its way, exactly right.

I photographed it from outside, dusk pressing against the glass, the tiny lights doubling themselves, belonging to both inside and outside simultaneously, anchored to neither. A make-do tree, in a transition time, glowing in the dark like it had always been there.