Light
Once upon a time I lived in a smallish apartment in New York (is there any other kind?). Realistically, I was lucky. There were two rooms and I could turn completely around in the bathroom, and I got grad student pricing (still probably higher than many peoples’ mortgages). No closet space exactly, and the kitchen was this beautifully organized but tiny little L-shaped space in the front hall.
The worst thing about that apartment was the light. My big pothos ivy gave up after 6 months and did the weirdest thing (I kid you not) – everything below 1.5 feet from the soil turned yellow and fell off. Over 5 feet of ivy! Bang! Gone! I took it home and left it with Jeff’s mom for a while after that to recover. We got exactly 2 hours of midafternoon sunlight during two months of the year in spring, and in fact it wasn’t even direct sunlight, it was reflected off the building next door. Plus, we had fluorescent lighting. It was the pits.
It took a couple of months for it to sink in what kind of an effect bad lighting has on the psyche, but and effect it certainly has. We got lamps with natural light bulbs and shut off the overheads for good, and that helped some. But there was still always something about living in that little, lightless place that went to my head. I probably shouldn’t mention my office is a small place with no windows and fluorescent lighting? Well, let’s just say it’s all made me much more sensitive to happy light.
There’s not a single point to this story except that I like rambling, and to say that sometimes I just have to grab the camera and show the nice glowiness of a lamp on a dark wall, or the soft light through the curtains on a weekend morning.
Quilt returns when I don’t have to sit through an hour of unexpectedly horrific traffic on the way home.
2 Comments
feel free to leave a few words of your own...Paula Frey — Tue Nov 25, 2008 at 11:08 pm (link)One thing that I am most grateful for in my ghetto condo is the light. We have windows up high and windows down low. There is so much more sun and moon than the standard student apartment and it does help to cheer me. Humans weren’t meant to live in closets. We may not have a chlorophyll system running things, but we are definitely directly affected by the light.
Melissa — Wed Nov 26, 2008 at 11:22 am (link)Well, your post does too have a point! As you titled it, it’s about light.
I will say this for Texas — we gets lots and lots of sunlight (duh). I’ve often wondered what would happen to me if I lived somewhere that’s cloudy all the time. I can absolutely feel my mood lift when I’m in the sunshine, or when light pours into a window. I’d need one of those seasonal-affective disorder remedying lamps if I lived in the Pacific Northwest — or in New York.
In short, light is important. I agree.
