The Light Stays On

Odessa’s porch light went out sometime in the week.

I noticed it Thursday, walking back from the store. Her house sits two down from the corner, and that light’s been on every evening for as long as I’ve known her, which is longer than some of you have been alive. A little yellow light over the steps. You could set your watch by it.

Thursday it was dark.

Now, a porch light going out is nothing. A bulb does what a bulb does. But Odessa lives alone since Walter passed, and a woman who lives alone learns to sit in the dark and call it fine. She won’t ask anybody to climb up there for her. She’ll tell you she’s been meaning to get to it. She’ll tell you it’s not a bother. And she’ll sit on that porch in the evening with no light over her head and call that fine too.

I know that, because I know Odessa. And I know the difference between a thing somebody can’t do and a thing somebody’s decided they don’t deserve to have done for them.

So I did what I know to do. I went home, and I came back the next morning the way I go everywhere, slow and on purpose and carrying something. A plate, because Odessa won’t cook for just herself anymore and I know it. And a bulb, because I keep bulbs. You keep what people forget to.

She came to the door already telling me she was fine.

I said, “I didn’t ask you was you fine. I brought you some smothered chicken.”

That stopped her. You hand a person food and you take away their first three excuses.

We sat a while. The plate did its work. And when she got up to take it inside I said, real easy, like it just occurred to me, “Odessa, where you keep your step stool.”

She knew what I was doing. She let me do it anyway. That’s most of what love is, between two old women who’ve buried their husbands. Letting somebody do the thing you could pretend you didn’t need.

I climbed up on that stool, which is a foolish thing for a woman my age to do in broad daylight, and we did it anyway. The old bulb came out warm. The new one went in. And Odessa stood at the bottom holding the stool steady with both hands like I might fall, which I wasn’t going to do, but I let her hold it, because she needed to be holding something.

I won’t sit here and tell you we sang. Some things are too easy and still true. I’ll only say Odessa hummed something low while I climbed down, and I didn’t ask her what, because I knew, and she knew I knew, and that is most of what church is too.

The light’s on now.

It’ll be on this evening when she sits out there. And when somebody passes by and sees it, they’ll think nothing of it, the way you think nothing of a light that’s always on.

That’s the whole point of a light.

You only notice it when it’s gone.