The Light In Ada’s Eye

            Playing with a little fiction on a rainy afternoon

Sometimes on her darkest days, Miss Ada remembered the light. It didn’t take much, for the glow of it was indelibly locked, tick-tight in her brain. She had been seven the first time she saw it, a tiny speck visible through a tall stand of redwoods as wide as a road. She had to place herself just so on the rickety, front porch in order to make it out; otherwise it was obliterated by the towering giants that made her feel both small and enormous at the same time. She was a mere fleck of humanity beneath the huge trees, but she understood at the deepest level her immense capacity not only for appreciating the beauty surrounding her, but for creating grand imaginings as to the source of the light so far out of reach.

As the years progressed, Ada grew from a skinny, little girl into an adolescent beauty, her wide, brown eyes dominating an oval face framed by auburn curls that cascaded to her waist. She seldom ventured far from the modest, wooden cabin where her parents had chosen to live their lives and raise their only child. Fishing with her father, berry-picking with her mother, or hiking with the two of them kept her fit. At home, when not helping her mother with mundane chores, she lost herself in books, hundreds of them that her parents had lugged into the forest by mule years before. And she wrote, page after page until her diaries, dozens of them, were filled and deposited in haphazard stacks beneath her bed.

To fuel her writings, not one day passed that Ada did not seek out the light, her light, a magical mystery of her own making. In all her years the illumination had not altered, but in her mind’s eye it transformed time and again: a window behind which a lantern was held by a young boy, a witch, a withered hunter, or a strapping man, handsome and eager; a Gatsby-like beacon beckoning her there; a light from a river boat stuck on a shore; the shining orb from a warrior’s last stand; or perhaps, in her widest dreams, it was God’s eye.

When the misfortune of death took her parents away, one right after the other, Ada stayed on at the cabin beneath the redwoods, bewildered and sad, not only because she missed them terribly, but because when the last shovel of dirt had been thrown into her mother’s grave, she wandered back to the house, stood on the porch away from a pelting rain, and found that her, oh-so-familiar light had mystically disappeared. Though she stared until her eyes stung, she never found the glow again. It was gone, simply gone, until, of course, she closed her eyes.