The Firefly House

         The note sat perched upon the coffee maker the morning she had left.  An all-caps “GOODBYE” scribbled across the index card in Sharpie black.  It was her quick handwriting, as if saying goodbye to her husband of 12 years was an afterthought.  Six months after a single index card was all that was left of Karen, the coffee maker remained unused, the note remaining where it was first placed.  It was a fast separation, but a painful divorce.  Their two children, Grace, 11, and Paul, 9, took the majority of the pain during the custody hearings where they were being pulled in both directions, almost as if they were being tortured.  It began and ended in half a year.
         After the divorce and custody was finished, 1159 Cogdill Drive sat empty for years.  The only living thing that remained was the empty soul of Bret Williamson.  In his prime, he was an executive in a major real estate firm with twenty people working under him.  His wife made meatloaf once a week and the kids’ A+ papers hung from the refrigerator.  Christmas parties filled the house with important clients, close friends and neighbors, not to mention extensive amounts of holly lining the hallways and lights outlining the windows, doorways and gutters on the exterior of their home.  Within the confines of an exhaustive marriage, Karen found happiness in little things: watching hummingbirds pick at the red nectar she set out for them, watching her children catch fireflies out on the front lawn, and decorating the house thoroughly with Christmas lights.
         Now, Bret headed an entire division as a district manager, a position he filled almost a year ago after devoting nearly every waking moment of his life into work.  The buzzing computer screens, eye strain from reading 10-point font on hardcopies, and the other inconveniences of white collar life were just irritating enough to momentarily depart his mind from the depression that had engulfed him for the last three years.  He was a natural at separating his personal life from his profession; tricks he learned during the rougher parts of the marriage.  Kids visited sparingly and less as the years progressed.  Soon, he knew, they’d stop coming altogether once they didn’t have to.  Three cards a year for each child, a check in one.  The patterns of the pen were like clockwork and he never wrote anything that personified emotion.  Depression had choked the life out of Bret and replaced his blood with colored liquid apathy.  For three years after the divorce, there was nothing of great importance to be said about the personal life of Bret Williamson.
         Autumn of the third year was an especially cold one.  Children liked to build mountains of leaves in his front lawn and ride their bikes through them.  Though Bret spent most of his time downstairs, he occasionally saw the neighborhood bursting with action.  People moving through their lives with meaning, goals.  Bret’s most recent goal was to learn to speak Spanish.  Perhaps it was a way of tricking himself into thinking that he was doing something that was important; anything besides what he had been doing for three years straight – nothing worth mentioning.  The itch to do something was growing, though, like a rash.  To do what, Bret could not say, but he was becoming less depressed with the loss of his marriage and more depressed with the fact that his life had stopped and he wasn’t releasing the parking brake.
When October came, he began to strip his house from the inside out.  Furniture, boxes, storage, coasters, everything.  He moved it out of the room, painted the walls, refurnished the furniture, and replaced what he wanted.  The massive redecoration of his home not only scratched his itch, but also expanded his living space.  He placed old exercise equipment that had ended up in the garage into an unused room.  He had repainted the children’s rooms and buffed every floor in the household.  It was amazing how much got done within just two months of work.  Bret wondered if he could have cured Alzheimer’s if he had worked since the divorce.
As the paint cans and brushes were put away, the house produced an aura of change.  A once dusty, unkept house had been changed into a comfortable new start.  And as Bret reveled in his first personal accomplishment in years, he did not feel the way he had expected to feel.  The smell of new paint and sawdust; the touch of smooth floors and sanded doorways.  It wasn’t real.  The renovation of the house had intended to be the renovation of himself, but he still felt dusty and unkept inside.  The answer did not lie in the removal of Karen from his life.  An amputated arm can still itch. 

Thanksgiving was a treat for Bret.  He spent the weekend with his parents at their log cabin up north along with other family.  The escape relieved him, but his return once again prompted the question of what he would do with himself for another month before meaningful human contact was required.  During his home redecoration fling, he had unloaded from the attic about a dozen green and red plastic tubs all marked “CHRISTMAS” on the side, in black Sharpie, but not in quick handwriting.  They sat waiting for him in the living room, and he wondered what they wanted.  To opened so that their contents could be thrown all around the house, serving as yet another reminder of the life he once had?  That was perhaps the most logical theory. 
It had begun innocently enough: he wanted a wreath on his front door.  The wreath he found was placed in a tub full of outdoor Christmas lights.  The wreath itself was covered with lights and had to be plugged in, because Bret wouldn’t think of putting up a wreath with a wire hanging off it for no reason.  However, the nearest outlet was just out of reach and he did not have an extension cord in the house.  What happened next was just as innocent as the wreath: he set up a chain of lights around his doorframe to act as an extension to the plug, which worked just fine.  But something just didn’t look right about one doorframe of the entire house being lit while the others just sat there.
During the next few days, Bret began stringing lights in his window seals and gutters.  He found a load of extension cords underneath the mess of lights in the tub that would have solved his problem from the beginning, but it was too late to back out now.  He wasn’t sure why he had this desire for perfect holiday lighting, but in the back of his mind, he figured it had to do with Karen’s attention to detail on the subject.  By the first week of December, the lights had been finished and Bret felt satisfied.  His time reverted back inside the house, where he was faced with more empty time than before.  After he returned from the office, he came home to an empty house with lights outside.  It made no difference, his heart ached more than it had before.  He was having withdrawals from depression, causing more depression.  His attention moved to the liquor in the cabinets he had stopped referring to in October.  The days were getting colder and shorter, and while he slipped himself in the envelope of alcoholism, he felt that he was too.
But that feeling was short lived.  Nearly two days after he went back to the bottle, he began noticing children and neighbors watching his house as they walked by.  Could they sense the soul of a troubled man inside?  Or were they reminded of a time not so long ago when that same house was inhabited by a few more and the joy that lived in it flowed outside in the form of hundreds of lights?  Outside the house, whispers of an old family filled the neighborhood and there were rumors of a reunion of sorts.
One night, Bret prepared to light up the house for the first time in a few days. Before he flipped the switch, he noticed something: five children stood on the other side of the road staring at his house and whispering to one another as their breath vaporized in front of them. He also noticed several houses in his proximity had spectators in their front windows, staring at his house as well. Bret suddenly felt a stir inside himself; a chill up his back and goose bumps on his arms. He was putting on a show.  Neighbors, who use to fill his living room with little meatballs on toothpicks and glasses of eggnog, who he was sure had forgotten about 1159 Cogdill Drive, were staring in anticipation.  Were they ruthlessly gossiping about the poor man inside desperately clinging to happiness by recreating one of his wife’s favorite past times?
Maybe.
Or maybe they were remembering themselves the days that the house across the lane was full of lights and life and joy.  Maybe there were less rumors of a sad old man and more hopes of a revived home that awed them so long ago. The feeling invigorated Bret more than anything he had felt in the last three years.  More than selling a beach-side condominium and much more than a 10% Christmas bonus.  He had a purpose and he had a goal.  And that night, he began his work.

Two days later, there was a flyer on every door in the neighborhood. It was an invitation to a party for every child on the street, and the invitation encouraged them to bring a guests – their parents.  Bret did not know that the invitations had caused an enormous amount of excitement and esteem among the children, who had always been told to “be seen - not heard” at neighborhood parties.  This was a special event – and they were only asked to bring a string of their favorite Christmas lights, which they all did.  At the party, Bret personally greeted each and every guest at the door and laid out the rules: the lights were to be strung anywhere on the house and, with a lot of electricity and a bit of luck, they would collectively have the most Christmas lights on any house in the state.
Excitement filled the children’s eyes as they rushed inside and outside the house with extension cords and lights dangling behind them.  Bret had prepared enormous amounts of food for everyone and made it clear, “There will be no worries about making a mess or being a nuisance.  This is a time for joy and happiness, not worry.”
By nighttime, almost every inch of the house was covered in lights, and even the inside walls were lined with uneven strings.  Several news channel vans had somehow found their way to the house and set up cameras for the record-breaking attempt.  Bret merely sat in the background and gave the word. Minutes later, an intense glow illuminated the neighborhood as over one-million tiny Christmas lights came to life.  It was the beginning of an annual event that brought children and children-at-heart from different cities and states to view, what the local children had began calling it, the Firefly House.  The lonely house had a new, revived purpose.
Bret Williamson was revived as well.  It was almost comical that a few lights could have pulled a man out of such sadness and loneliness, but it did; and Bret found that an unfamiliar life did exist after a familiar one ended.