Okay, straight up: my difficulties with light switches are my problem, not theirs.The more general problem I have with them is poor muscle memory. Now why my ordinarily good and swift muscle memory finds light switch placement to be its stumbling block, who knows. If I’ve taken a route on foot across a strange town or a strange neighborhood, I can find my way back along it with my eyes virtually closed. I can pick up a wire whisk once every decade and my wrist falls to with proper whisking whispery like nobody’s business.
But let me walk up in any given room for a week, a year, three years, whatever, and I am still lost about the lightswitch placement. Or where the kitchen lightswitch lives, or…. And I am one of those scrupulous turn-off-the-lights-when-you-leave-the-room midcentury children so I am fumbling for my household lightswitches most evenings and mornings.
My current abode came with a couple extra tricky lightswitches, sort of like putting a paraplegic into an apartment with exceedingly narrow doorways. These switches operate the ceiling lights in the dining and living rooms (The dining room as it was designed, not as it’s used). Lights in both those rooms was atrocious. Each ceiling fixture is designed with three bell-shaped sconces, all pointing down and out into the room. And turning on the lightswitch in either room produced about three watts of gloom.
A houseguest and I sat drinking coffee one gloomy (outside as well as in) morning. The table was piled with lightbulbs which I hadn’t got around to switching in the offending lights, mostly because the lights are a good ten feet off the ground and my step ladder brings me to something around almost-six feet off the ground.
“You’re going into the bulb trade?” she asked.
“Nah, it’s these damn lights. They must have single watt bulbs in them.”
“Huh, really? Even when you turn up the dimmer switch?” she asked, reaching over and sliding the infinitesimal shred of plastic running along the side of the lightswitch.
Oh behold, there was light.
And there is every grey morning when I can find the lightswitch.
Mainely Portland 