While the light is free

"Every generous act of giving, with every perfect gift, is from above, coming down from the Father of lights, with whom there is no variation or shadow due to change." — James 1:17

My mother used to say: do it while the light is free.

She meant get out there. Whatever the outdoor job was — the wash, the beans, the porch that wanted sweeping, the last of whatever was in the row — you did it while the sun was up, because the sun cost nothing and the bulb in the kitchen cost something, and in that house we knew which things cost something.

She grew up in a house that did not have a light in every room, and I do not think she ever once got over the arithmetic of it. Even in the sixties, with my father doing well enough at the store, she would be out at the line at half past six in the evening in August finishing something up, and if you asked her to come in she would say it in that flat way she said all her sayings, like she was reading you the weather. Do it while the light is free.

I have been thinking about her saying it because I have three weeks left of being able to do it.

That is what late September is around here. The evening light is a thing that is being taken away from me a few minutes at a time and there is no appeal. Come November I will go out to the barn at half past four with a flashlight in my coat pocket like a fool. But right now, this week, there is still a good hour after supper that is free, and I have been using it, and I did not entirely understand until this year that using it was a habit she handed me and not a thing I thought up.

That is how it works with your mother. You spend a certain number of years thinking you are a person who made herself, and then you are seventy-seven and standing in the yard at seven o'clock doing a job that could perfectly well wait until tomorrow, because the light is free.

James calls him the Father of lights, with whom there is no variation or shadow due to change. Which is a strange verse to put next to an equinox, when variation and shadow are the entire news.

But I think that is the point of it, or one of them. The light out here is on a schedule and the schedule is tightening, and I lose four minutes a night whether I have finished or not. And the light the verse is talking about does not do that. It does not get to November.

My mother would not have said any of this. She would have said get the beans in.

She would have been right, and she would have meant more than she said, which is what she generally did.

Father of lights, thank you for the hour I have got. I am going out in it.