Lighting our way Home

There is something about an old school at night.   There's one around the corner from my house.  It has been abandoned for years, recently sold to a developer and is soon to find a new life as the center of a condo project.  Its skin thin windows, are always dark. The cement and stone steps, where generations of children and their teachers marched, jumped, skipped, ran and trudged up, are now cracked and full of weeds in the summer, covered in snow this cold night.

I pull up to the stop sign near the school.  It is that time of winter when the days are getting longer and as I pull over to look, everything, cars, road, snow and school is coloured by a pink hue of a setting sun.  It is a scene out of a Frost poem.

There it is,  a light in the second floor window, in the corner classroom and just for a moment, I am happier than I have been all day.

Just for a moment, I think the school is alive again.  There is a teacher in that room.  She is grading some papers or she is preparing tomorrow's lessons.  I think she should get home, it is too late and her family needs her.  Or maybe there are students there.  They are staying late, practicing for an upcoming concert or play.  Maybe they are working on a class project and the teacher is helping them.  Maybe it's the custodian, pushing the chairs in, getting ready to wash the floors, picking up a sweater  that has dropped from a desk. Or maybe it is the principal, sitting with some parents, discussing their child's progress, each trying to find difficult answers. Or maybe it is the parent's council, trying to figure out how to raise some funds for a school trip.  In my mind, they are all there tonight and it makes me smile to myself as I put the car in gear.

A light in a window of an abandoned school has somehow made me warm on a cold winter's night.  I turn the corner and head home but my eyes keep glancing to my rear view mirror, hoping to see a silhouette of a person in the school; hoping to see all of those people who make a school.

But it's not just the desire to see the building alive again that has warmed me.  It is the importance of these places. We have built these places and while some need to be torn down or re-purposed, they remind me of the great commitment that we have made to one another and of our dedication to each others' children.

This is the light that guides me home.