A Quiet Pool of Lamplight

My real life kitchen in its natural state

My entire house is quite dark in the winter time. I have big windows and skylights and light tubes, but still. Gloomy. It was bothering me in the kitchen, particularly when I want to prepare things on that bit of counter by the stove. The overhead lights are intrusively bright, even after I turned them to a more palatable color, so it’s unpleasant to have them on unless it’s actually night. But there isn’t really a way to add area lights.

Then, somewhere on my social media travels, I saw a British interior designer recommend standing lamps on the kitchen counter.

This had never once occurred to me. A lamp!

So I went down to my storage area and found this very inexpensive lamp I bought a couple of years ago and have no place for in this house. As you see, it’s quite lovely. I especially like the warmth in contrast to all that cool color, the grays of the cupboards and the sky and the rain. I turn it on first thing in the morning when I’m going to cook and it stays on all day. It’s so cheering, I found the companion lamp and settled it by the stairs, where I was planning to install light tubes in the ceiling and discovered, for all kinds of complicated architectural reasons (mainly to do with people adding on to the original beach cottage willy nilly) that it’s impossible. Eventually maybe I can add a window, but I was just living with the gloom.

Now—ta da! It’s very cheery, too.

At tai chi yesterday, a woman told me she’d discovered my novels and had taken them on vacation, but then kept reading them when she came home because, “they’re getting me through a lot of…stuff.” I cheered, and gave her arm a squeeze. “That’s my entire goal,” I said, “giving you a place to retreat when stuff gets to be too much.”

Sometimes, I think I should be noisier about…stuff. I have at times, been a journalist, writing about issues. It’s natural for me to write about issues, and why we should care, and see if I can make a difference.

But the winter darkness is here, and there are those who write about everything with such incisive clarity that I would only be offering an echo chamber.

Instead, I’ll be a lamp on the counter, hoping to offer some warmth in the cold dark. As I’ve just discovered, that can be a lot.

What lamps are you lighting this week?