Lambent

Todays word is lambent which is an adjective which can mean either:

1. Running or moving lightly over a surface

2. Dealing lightly and gracefully with a subject

3. Softly bright or radiant

~~~~~

Any city mail carrier, working during the months of December, will spend a small portion of her winter work day driving a postal truck over unplowed roads, to reach predetermined destinations, and hopefully a place to park, off the main road. This driving usually occurs around the third hour of the day, since the first hours are spent sorting, organizing, and loading the truck with the hundreds of letters and dozens of packages. On a good day, around 11:00, she will make her first delivery, and will ultimately complete a six hour hike, over eight plus miles of snowy sidewalks and icy stairs, through drifted mounds of knee deep snow or climbing up over hard clods of plowed snowbanks, to reach almost 600 mailboxes along the way. She will play frogger with traffic as she crosses busy streets and use her bag to defend her legs when she is confronted by dogs. She will arrive at every residence, regardless of the weather, as the skies shed snow, sleet or rain, and, particularly in the month of December, during the shortest days of the year, she will never make her last delivery before the outdoor holiday lighting displays cast a lambent glow over her path. But the outdoors is her favorite kind of office, and many of the customers on her route are her friends, many who happen to be elderly and who depend on her for both their mail and her concern, and so, regardless of the weather and the physical hardships, when you ask her about her job, she will most likely say, “Oh, I can’t complain”.

~~~~~