Just thought this was a lovely story, especially for
Winter Solstice...returning/enacting Light that
illuminates darkness... ;) Pics at link...
***
It started last November with a single string of
Christmas lights on a Baltimore County street.
Kim Morton was home watching a movie with her daughter
when she received a text from her neighbor who lives
directly across the road. He told her to peek outside.
Matt Riggs had hung a string of white Christmas lights,
stretching from his home to hers in the Rodgers Forge
neighborhood, just north of the Baltimore city line. He
also left a tin of homemade cookies on her doorstep.
The lights, he told her, were meant to reinforce that
they were always connected despite their pandemic
isolation.
“I was reaching out to Kim to literally brighten her
world,” said Riggs, 48.
He knew his neighbor was facing a dark time. Morton had
shared that she was dealing with depression and anxiety.
She was also grieving the loss of a loved one and
struggling with work-related stress. The mounting
pressure led to panic attacks.
Riggs could relate.
Guiding his two teenagers through remote school was
draining, financial angst was consuming and “by the end
of the year I was just beside myself, 2020 was difficult
for a lot of us,” he said.
A bit of brightness was in order, he decided, but he
certainly did not expect that his one strand of Christmas
lights would somehow spark a neighborhood-wide movement.
In the days that followed Riggs’s light-hanging gesture,
neighbor after neighbor followed suit, stretching lines
of Christmas lights from one side of the street to the
other.
When Leabe Commisso, who lives on the other end of the
block, saw what Riggs had done, she wanted in.
“I said to my neighbor: ‘Let’s do it, too,’ ” she
recalled. “Before we knew it, we were cleaning out Home
Depot of all the lights.”
Quickly, other neighbors caught on.
“Little by little, the whole neighborhood started doing
it,” said Morton, 49, who has lived in Rodgers Forge for
17 years. “The lights were a physical sign of connection
and love.”
She and Riggs were stunned to see neighbors with drills
and ladders, up on their rooftops and tangled in trees —
doing whatever they had to do to hang the lights
horizontally. They were mostly masked and at a distance,
but for the first time in a long time, a feeling of
togetherness — and light — had returned.
“What blows my mind is that it was all organic,” Riggs
said. “It just happened. There was no planning. It just
grew out of everybody’s desire for beauty and joy and
connection.”
Seeing his neighbors adopt his idea, “genuinely brought
tears to my eyes,” Riggs continued. “From such a humble
beginning, a tiny little act, it became this event.”
Even though he was initially seeking to support Morton,
“it turns out, we all needed this,” he said.
Melissa DiMuzio, who lives on the same block with her
wife and two children, was due for a pick-me-up.
“It was a tough time. We were all struggling in our own
way,” she said. When she saw what Riggs had done, “I
really wanted to participate.”
DiMuzio took her contribution a step further. She decided
that, on her string of lights, she would include a
fitting message: “Love lives here.”
“I’m a go-big-or-go-home kind of person,” she said. “I
stayed up all night bending dry cleaning coat hangers. It
was crazy, but it worked.”
Before the pandemic, DiMuzio and her wife were
contemplating moving to a new area, hoping for a house
with more space and a bigger yard. But once they saw how
the neighborhood came together to support one of their
own, the couple decided to stay.
“You’re not going to find this community just anywhere,”
DiMuzio said, estimating that of the hundreds of red-
brick rowhouses that make up the neighborhood, at least
75 percent of residents participated in the entirely
unplanned light display.
Although it started on Dunkirk Road, other streets in the
area were soon lined with lights, too, and each block had
its own character. While some showcased classic white
lights, others opted for colorful or twinkly bulbs.
Megan Wilberton, a middle school teacher who lives on
Murdock Road with her husband and two children, quickly
got on board.
“It was unbelievable,” said Wilberton, who recently
shared the story in a Facebook post. “It just blossomed
into this amazing community effort.”
“It’s the best neighborhood,” she added. “Everybody is
friendly and helpful and loving and kind.”
For Riggs, the sea of light symbolizes exactly that.
“It really does represent a connection that we are
feeling,” he said. “This is a very special neighborhood,
and this is a physical manifestation of that.”
The collective display resonated so deeply that the
neighborhood agreed to do it again this year — and every
year to come, pandemic or otherwise.
On Nov. 21, Rodgers Forge residents hung their lights
together.
“We made a party of it,” Riggs said.
To emphasize their commitment to the project, and ease
the process going forward, neighbors drilled anchors into
the brick of their homes and attached the light strands
to metal cable wires to make them more secure. They also
added more signs to go along with the original “love
lives here” motto, including one that says “dream” and
another that says “believe.”
“It’s been a bright spot — truly,” Riggs said.
But the impromptu effort has perhaps had the most
profound impact on the person for whom it was originally
intended.
“It made me look up, literally and figuratively, above
all the things that were dragging me down,” Morton said.
“It was light, pushing back the darkness.”
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