Hard shoes, nine satellites

Once dusk turns to darkness, the senses strengthen to the nighttime environment

I realize, my feet tapping down the road alone, that when it gets cold enough, the heels of your running shoes make a different sound: instead of whispering along, the cold gives each fall of your foot a blocky, almost wooden sound — as if you had changed your shoes to some kind of discount clogs. It’s a lighterpitched but harder sound.

I’m making my way through the near-night to the ocean. I’m half a kilometre away, but I can already hear the waves.

There’s no wind — and everything seems larger, sharper, even with less light. Spruce trees, for example — before they simply go matte black from the backlighting of the fading horizon, they manage to web together into a blue-grey wall, impenetrable. Bigger. Bulkier. There are five houses.

Five houses in the whole town with Christmas lights.

But at least their lights are robust. Well, most of them.

The ladies at the top of the road have settled for two triangular lines of lights, representing trees, in two of their front windows. Still, it’s effective. Their house is red, and with the dark, it sinks back into the black shoulders of the hill behind. It’s understated, to be sure, but, as the only lights on the hill, it works.

Others are almost explosive: drenched in lights, as if challenging the night.

A bungalow shouts “NOEL” in two-foot-high, bright red LED lights along the front of the house under the living room window — a back room with an aggressive and alternating “Merry” and “Christmas” in shocking red and blue. The lights flash, the windows are bright, but no one in the house moves through the glare.

Others simply drip with strings of colour, inflatable figures staring into the dark.

At the cliff over the water, you can hear the waves clearly, and it’s dark enough now — no moon — that you see the white of the massive wave crests best by not looking at them at all. By not focusing, by holding your stare wide.

Back at the house, I unfold a green and white striped lawn chair directly under the white and purple roil of the Milky Way, bend myself backwards in an uncomfortable shape to watch the stars. I shiver.

In the time I am sitting down under the stars, the frost falls.

Not on me or on the lawn chair, but on everything else. A nearby bench is frosted with fine glassine frost spikes and wedges — when I set my glass on it, there’s a slip and settle. The grass, when I stand up after watching the stars, crunches underfoot in a way it did not when I sat down.

To the left, there’s the black hunch of the low barn and the reaching-to-the-sky black fingers of the big poplars, now leafless. In my time in the canvas chair, I’ve puzzled over constellations, and I’ve watched nine satellites arc by, two of them close together and following the same track, the rest of them lonely travellers.

Inside the kitchen, the big blue Defiant woodstove is, no doubt, ticking, logs becoming embers. The stove ticks as it warms, ticks as it cools, as if discussing its work.

Over the house and to the west, where the sun has gone, Jupiter and Saturn were already close; their great conjunction was last night, hundreds of years in the making.

But as I made my way to the door, the big night above and around me, I had that familiar feeling: so full of impressions that I felt I must be huge, but under that great and holding sky, knowing I was tiny.

In the distance, to the northeast, a rabbit-dog sang of Christmas.