Just a couple days ago we met the neighbor that lives across the dirt and gravel road from us. He's in the process of retiring, so apparently he's spending some newly found time and energy on his digs. We now live on a forest moon of the planet Seattle, a rural island accessible only by plane and ferry, with 12 thousand folks and a whole lot of trees and not a lot of lights. It gets very dark on the island, and it is very quiet.
When we first moved here a few days ago, when it was night and the moon wasn't in the sky, it was so dark neither of us could see a thing. When the moon is out it casts a pallor of ghostly light among the trees where we live that's almost bright enough to read by. Quite a difference from life in Chicago where you need to close the blinds to thwart the relentless bright glare of sodium vapor street lights. Now we're working out strategies for installing night lights which strategically marker useful places like steps and light switches using very low light.
Remarkably against the apparent spirit of this place, the neighbor has put a pair of lights atop a new brick entrance for his driveway. These are a pair of glass and gold structure lamps containing bright, bare filament bulbs that are turned on at dusk and turned on at dawn. My night vision is about as good as any Chicagoan (lousy). These things cast a unidirectional beacon of painful light right into our otherwise pitch black front yard and by and large destroy the chance to look around and up without the threat of bright light, which I find annoying.
He also chopped down a clearing in some trees on a part of his land which is near our driveway, and put up an open-sided white canvas equipment tent. In two weeks, we went from not seeing much of anything other than trees (his house is downhill from the road so we can't see it at all) to lights, some metal artifacts used as "lawn ornaments", and a white tent.
None of these changes would possibly matter in Chicago. You really feel them here, tho.
He says he's spent his entire life on the island, but I wonder if he isn't a suburbanite in spirit?
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