The Inheritance of Light

My father taught me to notice light. I did not know this was a gift until he was gone.

He was not a photographer or a painter. He was an accountant who spent his working life in fluorescent-lit offices, and yet he had an eye for natural light that I have never seen matched. He could tell you the quality of the light at any hour of any season — the flat gray light of February afternoons, the golden slant of October evenings, the particular blue of early morning in summer before the heat arrived.

He pointed these things out to me when I was a child, and I absorbed them without knowing I was absorbing them. It was only later, living alone in a series of apartments, that I realized I was doing what he had done — pausing at windows, noting the angle of the sun, feeling something shift in me when the light changed.

Light is the thing I notice most about a place. Before the architecture, before the people, before the smell or the sound, I notice the light. Every city has its own light, its own quality of illumination. The light in the city where I grew up is different from the light in every other city I have lived in, and when I go back, it is the light that tells me I am home before anything else does.

I have been thinking about what we inherit from our parents that is not genetic, not material, not even consciously taught. The habits of attention. The things we learn to notice because they noticed them. My father's eye for light lives in me now, and I did not ask for it and could not have refused it.

I am grateful for it. I am grateful for all the things he taught me to see.

The light this morning is the color of old paper, warm and slightly amber, the kind of light that makes everything look like it is being remembered rather than experienced. My father would have had a name for it. I am still learning the vocabulary.