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All is Bright

All is Bright

Last updated on: December 14, 2024 at 7:08 pm by Mary Pezzulo

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All is Bright 2024-12-14T19:08:37-04:00 Mary Pezzulo

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Winter is a bleak time, but did you know it’s also lavish?

We are one week out from the darkest time of year, but it’s been so wonderfully bright.

On Thursday, I went out to the mineral spring, where I often go to pray, and the sun was not only brilliant overhead but also brilliant on all sides where the light caught the snow. It was brilliant all the way uphill, where the leafless trees didn’t filter out any sunlight at all. When I got up near the top of the hill, a female cardinal flew up in front of me, between my face and the sun, so the light filtered through her wings like stained glass and I could see all the soft red coloring you only glimpse when the female is in flight.

When I got to the waterfall, it wasn’t quite frozen up yet. The water was dripping into the natural font, and slick on the shale in front of me. But where it spilled over the cliff, there were icicles forming. And in the water splashing at the bottom of the cliff there was a cache of diamonds, where the drips were all forming into bright round bubbles of ice.

On Friday, I went out to Jefferson Lake. The last time I’d been there, it was frozen, but there wasn’t any snow. This time, the snow covered all but the tallest grass on the shore, and it covered much of the lake itself. The lake was a sheet of glass, except for a few open places in the very center. I tapped it with my toe, as I had last week. This time, it didn’t shatter. It only cracked, and shimmered, and shone until I had to turn away.

I stopped to watch a blue jay and three red-naped sapsuckers dancing from tree to tree– the bluejay a flash of sapphire, always landing upright on a branch, and the sapsuckers black with ruby streaks, lading sideways on the trunks. They called back and forth in their harsh voices, an Appalachian litany.

When I got Adrienne from school, we barely had time to rest before we went to Fort Steuben to see middle school friends performing in a band concert. I thought it would be a small concert, indoors in the warming tent at the Advent market, but it turned out that this was an enormous concert in which every school in the district would participate– and they were holding it in the amphitheater behind the fort, outdoors.

I had changed out of my hiking boots into nicer clothes and ballet flats to see the concert. Adrienne and I stood at the back of the venue, shivering more and more and more violently, trading back and forth the one pair of gloves I’d remembered in my pocket so that neither of our sets of hands froze. The sun set, and the wind chill plummeted. We patiently watched the high school band and the high school drum corps, followed by one and then another elementary school’s choir and dance troupe, each performing a repertoire of holiday songs and all doing a lovely job, but the middle school orchestra didn’t appear. The audience began to drift away, complaining of the cold. After an hour and a half, my feet were burning inside my thin shoes. I explained we had to leave, or I would get frostbite.

We turned to go, and there was Adrienne’s best friend, bundled up properly for the cold, running up to us holding a viola case. He explained that they’d canceled his portion of the concert because it was too cold to play instruments outside.

Adrienne and her gang of friends went off to get hot chocolate and explore the heated parts of the Advent Market, and Adrienne took my gloves with her. I ended up taking refuge in the warming tent until my fingers and toes thawed out enough to walk safely to the parking lot. I don’t know what mechanism they use to heat the tent. I just know that I was sitting in a chair in front of a false fireplace with a red lightbulb flickering inside a plastic yule log, gradually coming up to temperature, while the bored orchestra children and their parents socialized. The tent was lined with displays of the public school children’s artwork, a sea of colorful compositions, elves and reindeer and creche scenes all rendered in slick acrylic paint.

I gazed out the gap in the tent flaps at the Advent Market.

Christmas trees twinkled all over the park. The Jefferson County Courthouse shimmered in the distance, awash in a dancing light display projected on its facade. Far off in front of the municipal court building was some ridiculous carnival ride meant to look like an out-of-control excavator. It, too, was decked out in glittering lights. All was bright, colorful, and happy, at the very darkest time of the year.

The days are short, but they are brilliant days, and the nights are not dark.

All is calm. All is bright. And for the first time in my life, I am happy.

Mary Pezzulo is the author of Meditations on the Way of the Cross, The Sorrows an d Joys of Mary, and Stumbling into Grace: How We Meet God in Tiny Works of Mercy.

Steel Magnificat operates almost entirely on tips. To tip the author, donate to “The Little Portion” on paypal or Mary Pezzulo on venmo

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