Saturday, November 26, 2011

Darkness

I was a complete chicken.  I probably still am but in different ways.  I was one of those children who was "afraid of the dark".   Everybody told me there was nothing in the darkness that was not there during the light but I was skeptical.  What if there was and I could not see it coming?  Not that there was a whole heck of a lot I could have done.

I continued to be afraid of the dark until around the winter of '67-'68.  We moved back to Nat's Creek to the old Charlie Blessing house.  I had to walk about a quarter of a mile (maybe farther) from the house up the creek to the "main road" (such as it was) to catch the school bus.  In the winter that meant leaving home before daylight. 

The place we (My cousin Helen and I) waited for the bus was just below a large graveyard.  Helen and I had lots of interesting conversations there waiting for the bus  until they moved and I was on my lonesome in the dark of a morning.

It is really amazing how things change over time.  In time I ceased being afraid of the dark and started loving the dark.  I still do.  I find the night, the absence of light to be comforting.  There truly is nothing there in the darkness that is not in the light.  Well, except for those people who think the darkness may hide their evil.  But, I'm more at home in the night than I am in the day.  Ask Jimmy Ray.  When he and Danny and Jim Bob were teens we'd play war games and I could hide in the shadows where no one would think to look.  I love the darkness.  Isn't amazing how people and their perspectives change? 

There are times I will sit at home, here with my PC, and turn out all the lights and just bask in the darkness around me.  Darkness is not just the absence of light but it is a cocoon of comfort around me that I cherish.

But, I never got over my fear of the dark because anyone told me how harmless it was.  I got over it by enduring it and enduring my fears and finding them pointless.  Sometimes we come to love what was once hated.  There is so little difference between the two anyhow.  Now, give me the choice of spending the rest of my life in only the daylight or only the night I'd pick the  night with no hesitation.

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