“Years ago when we experienced the season known as spring, my father woke me late in the night to show me the sun. He carried me to the top of the hill and told me to look toward the horizon where the pine trees stood. My father wiped the snow from my lashes, and there it was, a little marble of light behind the treetops.
That’s the sun, my father said, and with any luck it will melt this snow so we can have summer.
I imagined that the birds flew and carried a lantern and placed it there in the treetops, because that’s exactly what it looked like to me.
It looks like a lantern, I said.
My father smiled, then kissed me on the forehead. He promised it wouldn’t be far away like that forever but would grow massive in the sky and warm my face.
Will it really do that?
Yes, Bianca, really, he said.
After seeing the sun, he carried me home and tucked me back in my bed and told me to sleep. But I couldn’t. I spent the rest of the night and morning staring out the window, trying to see the lantern in the treetops carried there by birds. What everyone else called the sun.”
- Light Boxes, Shane Jones
