Winter light

It's a quarter to four and I've just turned the lamps on.

Seattle's November is not cold, by the standards I grew up with. It's dark. The sun goes down before half past four now, and on most days there's no sun to go down, only a gray ceiling that gets slowly grayer until it's black. It's rained most of the month. Not hard. It just doesn't stop.

In Duluth the winter was darker on paper but brighter in fact, because there was snow. The snow took whatever light there was and threw it back at you. I remember walking home from school in December at four in the afternoon in what felt like the last bright hour on earth, everything blue and white, the lake steaming. Here the light doesn't bounce. It soaks in.

There's a moment some afternoons, around two, when the cloud thins over the Sound and a little sun comes in sideways through my west window and lies across the floor for ten minutes. I've learned to stop what I'm doing when it comes. I take my coffee to the patch of floor and stand in it like a cat. My neighbor across the way does the same thing; I've seen her at her window. We've never spoken, but we've nodded.

The rest of the time I have lamps. I've become a person with opinions about lamps. Warm bulbs, low, several of them, never the overhead. My mother does the same thing in her kitchen, and I used to think it was thrift.

How do you get through the dark months where you are?