By Roger Barbee
Many years ago I spent a few days in Cape May, N. J. to see the historical town and its Victorian houses. One afternoon I joined a walking tour of the town and the knowledgeable guide told the history of many houses and pointed out all the details of each. I remember him telling the group the purpose of the intricate gingerbread was not only to decorate the eaves and porches, but also to cast shadows of its various shapes onto the house. Skeptical of his interpretation for the finely turned gingerbread, I took a walk-through town early the next day, and I found the treasures that he had described: Before that tour I had only seen the gingerbread of any house in one dimension, it was just a good decoration on various parts of a house, but after that morning walk on the quiet streets of Cape May I saw another reel of what I had thought I had seen many times before.
Since that time in Cape May, I have marveled at gingerbread on houses and building. For many years I lived in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia which boasts many fine examples of gingerbread. Now I live on Lake Norman in North Carolina and the modern homes here have no gingerbread. But one recent morning while riding my stationary bike, I saw in the light of dawn the best gingerbread ever.
Because of the recent cloudy weather, and the earth’s tilt, the dawn I witnessed was markedly different than other ones, even on the day before. Riding the stationary bike in the shadow of our home, the sun was out of sight as it rose over Lake Norman, but its rays shown on the tall poplar tree across the road. The leafless branches of the tree held streams of dawn’s early sunlight before it moved on to lighten the shorter trees and eventually the lower trunks of the tall pines. Before too many minutes on the bike, I saw that dawn’s light highlighted the crepe myrtles in Brenda and Bill’s yard across our road. Since their row of crepe myrtles had not been crepe murdered, as observed by the Grumpy Gardner, their branches flowed skyward in a graceful reach. But I remembered the Cape May guide, so I looked at and beyond the bare branches of the trees to see their shadows on the Brenda’s house. By so doing, the dawn had another dimension.
Many dawns have I seen. Once I took a group of high school seniors on a hike in the morning dark to a rock outcrop overlooking Shrinemont, a retreat center in Virginia. Settling onto the large stone, we sat watching the dawn come, trying to locate on the forested horizon exactly where the sun would show. Time in that stillness seemed halted, but suddenly one of the students said in a hushed shout, “There it is.” We each watched until it grew too bright in the surrounding dark to directly look to, waiting for it to clear the eastern edge of that dawn. We then stood, stretched, and hurried down the trail to the dining lodge for a breakfast of fired apples, sausage, and pancakes.
In Hold Everything Dear, John Berger writes, “A mountain stays in the same place, and can almost be considered immortal, but to those who are familiar with the mountain, it never repeats itself.” Since moving to Lake Norman and taking my morning rides on the driveway, I have become familiar with our pine trees and the trees in our neighbor’s yards, the lake, our quiet road, sunrises, sunsets, and walking neighbors. All are like Berger’s mountain.
Many dawns. Like Berger’s mountain, all are the same, but all different. Each dawn, like the gingerbread on a house or the people who live in the house, will cast a different shadow each day: The shadows of mountains, trees, lakes, people, and more will mark the day as the same, but never repetitious.
Many dawns, and each casting its own shadows and memories.
