Wednesday morning, an electrician came to the new house.
(We still aren’t there – the movers come tomorrow morning.)
A problem or two had emerged, involving sparks emitting from a ceiling fan and a subsequent power failure on one side of the house. He fixed it, and we talked about him returning to install a fixture here and there.
It was the first anniversary of Michael’s death, but what was I going to do? Sit around? No need to do that in order to contemplate – every hour was marked anyway and wouldn’t be denied in my head, even as I argued with myself about the arbitrary nature of “year.” Why does “a year” mean anything more or less than 364 days or 366?
I don’t know. But it does – or I let it. I marked the hours and remembered what I knew about those early morning hours a year ago and imagined the rest from what I had been told. Couldn’t help it. Thinking about 7:30, then 8:30, and now it was 9:30, so close to the time the doctor wrote.
The electrician spread out his papers on the kitchen island. He moved some other papers out of the way and said something, and his words confused me at first – I thought he was talking about my house-in-process, but that made no sense at all.
He said, “It’s gonna be so pretty, isn’t it? I can’t wait.”
Then it hit me. What he had picked up and glanced at, a year after, almost to the minute, what had moved him to casually share a spark of faith, was a Mass card sent to me by a friend, a Mass card with a picture of Jesus walking in clouds, clouds with light emanating from them.
I can’t wait.
A year…maybe not so arbirtrary after all.


















