In Another Light

I haven’t yet run an electrical line to the hen house yet so my morning feedings are done with a flash light. This morning on my way back to the house I shone the light beam through my hand. I recalled how interesting this was to me as a child to actually see the dense look of the metacarpal bones through the red glow of my skin.

Flash lights are tools of discovery for children. It is when we first become aware of the meaning of “seeing things in a different light.”

My favorite story of illumination happened while I was a lad one summer in Canada. As I’ve described in past articles, the place where we stayed was primitive. Refrigeration was an ice house.

For those of you too young to have ever experienced an ice house, they are small barn-like structures. Ice is cut from the lake and hauled by horse carts and stored in a massive block pile and then covered with saw dust as an insulator.

My brother and I returned after fishing one night. We cleaned the fish at the dock and carried them into the ice house. He had his burlap sack of fish and I had mine. We jumped down into the ice pit. He brushed the saw dust away from the area where he stored his fish and I did the same on the other side of the ice block mound. One of us put our flashlight right up to the ice and the light shown out as a mysterious glow on the other side. It was a soft blue-greenish glow.

We placed our burlap sacks on the ice and covered them with saw dust. Then we went to another area of the ice pile, placing our flashlights against the blocks and swept saw dust away from several places which was like opening windows. The entire inside of the ice house glowed like a fire fly. It was the coolest thing had ever seen at that young age. I would love to find an ice house somewhere again and share the experience with others.