This isn’t quite a poem.

At some point, the familiar and the unfamilar blend together.

When it is very dark, the yard is quiet, and all the lights are out. When I’m standing beside the garbage pit to brush my teeth. I’m looking, across a shallow valley, to the lights of a village on the next hill.

It took a few weeks of vague feelings of confusion, as I walked back – past the latrine, chicken coop, and cooking shelter, to the cement house, corrugated metal roof, and my sleeping mat . .

. . . . before I figured it out.

Those lights are the same distance, the same trajectory of eye level, and almost the same spacing, as the lights of Lewis Point, across the North River from my kitchen window in Cornwall, PEI. Which I’ve stared out at for the past 20 years, under the yellow kitchen light, my feet resting on the heater, leaning on the table with the breadcrumbs from the toaster sticking to my elbows. I know those lights. I read them automatically, and am subconsciously in two places at once. I recognize them intrinsically. It is the same sight – for me, synonymous with home. And yet half a world away.

 

(I tried to take a picture at night, but it just looks black with some yellow dots. I’ll get a daytime photo, but it will look so completely different that you won’t believe it could look the same as PEI at night.)