Blame it on those little paper matchbooks, too soft, too small. Those first efforts when I was a child terrified me -- the idea that a flame would be held at the end of my fingers. And it seemed I could not get the paper match to take fire, in its clumsy travel along the rough lighting strip.
Wooden matches arrived as a huge relief in my life. I could get them to light without flinching much, just making my fingers scurry backward along the small stick as the flame took shape at its tip. Every since then, I've avoided matchbooks, and appreciated those cardboard boxes full of potential instead.
It's the middle of the Jewish Festival of Lights, Hanukkah, as I write this. I've just taken part in an online session called "Magnify the Light," hosted by Ritualwell, a Jewish collaborative; a rabbi in Israel gave a teaching about how powerful light is ("it just takes a little light to push back the darkness"), and half a dozen of poets -- including me -- read related work. Mine was one of my poems based in awareness of both my happy marriage and the absence of my beloved, as I'm now a widow. A widow who knows how fortunate she was, and is.
Then, as the session ended, I heard from Persimmon Tree, a lush and abundant online publication that delights especially in the lives of women over 50. My poem "Where's the Tag?" is in the just-revealed issue, and it deliberately rides the traditions of both my Quaker mother and my Jewish father. I've added a dash of the distress I hear around me, as many people who are oppressed by short days struggle through December, aiming for the relief of the Solstice and longer hours of sunlight ahead. Here's the link, and here's a screenshot too:
There, I've managed to light a match and then a candle in my own (rather dim) mountainside afternoon. I've said in other places this week that a candle can be both a candle of mourning and a festive custom, at one time. That's how it feels.
I'm so grateful that I've learned how to light a match ... even if it still makes me flinch a little.
