Wired for Light

It’s that time again. As the darkness of winter permeates the edges of our days, we look to our low-voltage strands of twinkle for a simulacrum of the stars. They bring us some sense of comfort, something to remind us that the sun will come again. Lights draped across aluminum gutters, tangled between tree limbs, boundlessly blinking outside warm, inviting shops on the Main Streets of villages and cities, luring us all in from the cold. 

Out here in our quaint town of Greenwich, the residents celebrate the coming holiday season with their traditional tractor parade. As new additions to the community, this year marked our family’s first experience of the event. Thousands of people turn out each year in freezing temperatures to line the streets of our small town, bearing witness to a long train of tractors of various sizes, workhorses which farmers have dressed in festive colored light. There are awards for the most impressive display of sparkle. At the Tractor Parade, the particularity of lighting is of the utmost importance.

Similarly, we here at Owl Pen Books know that even in the more mundane places we routinely inhabit, the strategic and purposeful placement of light can make all the difference with regards to our overall sense of happiness and the enjoyment of our days. This is why the first change we made this past season as the new owners of Owl Pen Books was to replace the dated 1970s fluorescent lighting in the store with new strands of hanging lamp with warm, soft LED light bulbs. As fledgling proprietors, we felt a sense of obligation to leave most of Owl Pen as it had been for decades. Some features of the store—shelves, books, etc.—remain in the same places they’ve been for sixty years, since long before my wife Sydney and I were born. We chose to leave all this intact so as not to spook the devout customers. For a bookstore in a barn off a dirt road in the country to have existed for so long, the previous owners must have been doing something right. Best not touch a thing, is what we thought, at least for the first year. If it ain’t broke…

And yet, for Sydney and me, the issue of lighting was a non-negotiable matter. The long fluorescent lights that lit our store for decades suggested the less than cozy ambiance of a garage or body shop. Functionally, the bulbs managed to suck up much more energy than the modern eco-friendly LEDs while managing to fall short in providing customers with enough light to read some of the fading titles on the spines of our treasured tomes. A simple shift in lighting can make all the difference in the world. Ask any serious photographer or cinematographer. Ask a social media influencer, whatever that is…But sometimes, the “simple” lighting change, no matter how subtle, takes more effort than what feels necessary.

When we purchased Owl Pen Books, my wife and I also acquired a nearly two-hundred-year-old farmhouse. We have learned a lot about the history of our home on Faraway Hill, which stands fifty yards or so from the original Owl Pen building. The original owner, Barbara Probst, the one who dreamed up this crazy business, spent two winters living out in that tiny, converted hog pen while she renovated the main house. All her work, the projects she took on by herself, of which there were more than not, plus those jobs for which she hired skilled laborers, are well documented in her own expressive prose, found in a box of her personal unpublished essays, left on a shelf in the living room. I’ve mentioned this before in previous posts and articles. I will continue to do so. It feels like a rare gift, one that many people I tell don’t fully appreciate. How many of you have illuminating files of short memoirs detailing every aspect of the building of your home written in a charming, wry, humorous voice?

Here is what Barbara had to say about the wiring of the house and bringing our country home out of the dark ages of candle and oil lamp light:

I haunted the Niagara Mohawk Power Corp. and glory be to the U.S. Government, Rural Electrification was on the move. The boys from the power company surveyed my hermitage and, somewhat reluctantly, told me to have the house wired and then they would do their part. I noted this reluctance at the time but forged ahead on blind faith. Some ten years later when the power man came to put a bigger transformer on my entrance pole, he grinned and said: “A lot of us lost money on you ten years ago. There were darned few men on the board who thought you’d stick this thing out a year.”

But that lets out the fact I got the electricity—after two dandy chaps put wire, fuse boxes and misplaced plugs all over the place. The misplaced plugs were due to my inexperience. How could I know where furniture would be put when all I owned were two old beds, three iron frying pans and a beat-up typewriter? There’s a thousand dollars of electric wiring here and still I’m running extension cords all over the place. Ernie, the long-suffering electrician who has done my wiring since the first watt, has found me at times more trying than Okinawa. I was his first job when he got out of the army and he remembers well I kept saying, “Make everything BIG enough.” He remembers it well because I rub his nose in it every time he has to put in another fuse box. “If you’d done what I told you in the first place…,” I rail at him. H just grins and says, “Who’da believed it?”

Still, none of her writing informs us as to why, as I sit here, I must type by the light of two small lamps that sit on our farmhouse dining table, staring at the four-plug outlet powering said lamps, and why that outlet sits at belly level in the plastered wall between two original wavy glass-paned windows.

The Owl Pen will eventually need some new wiring too. But for now, the lights we strung across the ceiling of the main barn (with some # of bulbs in total) seem to be a hit with our customers. Over the six months of our first season, many regulars had kind words to say about the change. “It feels so much brighter in here!” “I can actually read all the book titles!” “It looks cleaner!” As the one who spent hours up on a ladder across every foot of the store configuring the strands and hanging the lamps, I took pride in the aesthetic change we made and the bit of ambiance it provided. 

But there are always critics. Someone once told me that if you want to be a true artist of any merit, your work, though heralded by many, will be disliked by some. It is a given. Such was the case that on the final Saturday of our first season. A woman stood impatiently in our yard as customers walked about our property in the sunny last gasp of autumn. She asked if I was the new owner, then introduced herself as a longtime customer. She asked if I knew about the lights I had installed and how dangerous they were for people like herself. I didn’t know what she was talking about. Seeing my puzzled expression, she explained that she was an epileptic prone to seizures brought on by LED light rays and that because we had installed our new soft LED lights, she would no longer be able to shop in our store. Immediately, I felt awful. Immediately I became apologetic. But a healthy sense of empathy could not stifle an equally healthy sense of skepticism. I began to ask various questions about her condition. It occurred to me that nearly every modern business or public building has LED lighting. I wondered how she navigated the world. Did she not go to Target like the rest of us? She told me she did not go to many places anymore and that she had to be very careful.

There was a long back and forth, one that felt longer because I felt helpless, almost as helpless as someone with this woman’s condition. I explained she was the first person to complain about the change in lighting, and we’d received nothing but compliments. This did not affect her. I offered a compromise. I said if she came back next season, she should make sure to come on a sunny day. We would gladly turn off the lights before she entered. Somewhat appeased, she moved on to another inquiry. She wanted to know if we would sell her the original Owl Pen hog pen structure because the property she lives on had a shortage of outbuildings. Do what you will with that.

Lighting can mean everything as one can see or not see…. It can be a beat-up old tractor with some lights tossed over its chassis, or an elaborate holiday float designed with a flashy color scheme to attract villagers out into the frigid air with their lawn chairs to draw audible oohs and ahs and bursts of applause. Depends on what light you are seeing it in. Is the Owl Pen a pile of dusty old books in a barn, or is it a prestigious, historic bookstore that continues to serve a community across generations? Well, in the right kind of light, it is most certainly the latter. Barbara Probst faced critics and naysayers blind to her vision. Still, she managed to bring in the electricity that powers our homestead and lights the way for Owl Pen today. She admittedly made some mistakes and as new owners of a business, so will we. But we think Barbara would encourage our attempts to improve upon what she built. After all, how was she to predict the advent of such things as grounded three-pronged outlets, apparently dangerous but eco-friendly LED light bulbs, or an evil corporation that sells outlets and light bulbs, as well as used books?

Recently, when the sun stopped getting up before the rest of us, we were stuck with the choice between a dark kitchen in the morning or one of those long fluorescent bulbs we had replaced in the store. After a week of feeling something less than cozy when making our coffee and packing our daughter’s school lunches, I went out to the main bookstore barn and found an extra strand of those cheap but warm-looking lights in an unopened box I had forgotten about. I tore down the long, rusty fixture that provided the kind of light still likely found in an old corporate office building or even an Amazon warehouse, and hung up the temporary fixture to get us through the holidays. 

Wishing you all love and light in this holiday season, the best kind of light for you. You might need the patience to wait for it to appear, like the sun or a specially decorated tractor. But in most cases, you’ll just need to move some fixtures around, and brighten some parts while dimming others. When you find the lighting that suits you, you’ll feel a deep sense of relief. Whatever the lighting choices are for you, they are bound to bother someone now or generations from now. That’s how you know they’re right.