Halloween Under Unwelcome Yellow

ANOTHER HALLOWEEN and another night of yellow-lighted roadway outside my home. It's overhead lighting from National Roads Authority fixtures that ensure road traffic outside can accelerate to 50 mph before leaving the built-up area. There's really no other reason to erect motorway-style lighting if you don't intend people to think the road surface invites steady acceleration. We used to live in Ballyclerihan, just outside Clonmel, where the yellow lights were confined to a ribbon on the main road and where you could see the stars outside our home. Because it was so dark inside the home, one 60-watt electric bulb really looked like 100 candles. Not here in our current home. Yellow light bleeds into the place and that actually creates another effect--we can actually move around the house without turning on any lights. All we have to do is remember to keep a few drapes split wide enough to let a sliver of light pour inside.

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Image from Gregory Crewdson's "Beneath the Roses", an exhibition that took three years to create, requiring the sort of production team usually reserved for a film.

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