An Equal Light

These blue skies of spring, tempered by a dusty softness where they meet the earth, are the skies of everywhere. At these middle times when we all face the sun the same, Crawley is Anywhereabad. Every town and village catches its breath, balanced briefly with equal days and equal nights, before the earth tilts them headlong into summer, or, I hear but hardly believe, winter in the south. And so, this West Sussex sky with with a greyed and dusky light glowing on the rendering and brickwork takes me everywhere I've ever been in spring under this same sun. Though I am not yet in Donne's New Heaven and New Earth, with 'neither darkness nor dazzling', there are at times glimpses of his 'equal light'. I am a mid-semester school girl faraway; I am at altitude and I am in cities; I am north, I am south and now I am here. This is Crawley, England, the World.

Our son knows Crawley best by these skies he looks up at laid in his buggy as well as by the minute topography of its streets: the tree roots jutting out of baked mud paths that bump his wheels; the flint chips mixed into concrete that jiggle him like a rattle; tarmac he glides over like a VIP or flagstones laid with precision and post-war civic pride. Travelling over these his buggy becomes the sleeper train - juggedy jug, juggedy jug - that lulled me to sleep as a child. And if a baby dreams his mother's memories, he is carried through the Shivalik Hills, into jungles, over the Yamuna bridge into the Old City and then out across the Deccan.