Lighting it Up

I had comp time coming, and since my normal Friday workday ends at noon, I extended the long weekend and took the morning off.  It’s been a long time since I’ve had a day to myself with nothing on the schedule, and I woke up feeling odd—conflicted as to what to do with the time.  But, I got where I needed to in the end.  The remains of a firewood delivery lay piled in our driveway, and after lugging wheelbarrows full of it to the back yard, I decided I’d earned an “Artist’s Date,” a practice I learned while working through TheArtist’s Way, by Julia Campbell.

Consider an “Artist's Date an indulgence in creativity, something to spur inspiration, and I could use a little help in that department.  To that end, I headed to Fort Revere, a historic park up high on a peninsula, with expansive views of Boston Harbor and Massachusetts Bay.  I brought the camera and the tripod, with one goal in mind.  To get a nice picture of Boston and Graves Lights, seemingly parallel to each other, at the mouth of Boston Harbor. 

I’ve taken enough pictures now to know that light is more intriguing in the early in the day and pre-sunset.  I, however, arrived mid-morning, and with a postcard clear day, there wasn’t much going on in the sky.  But still, I took it all in, the boats plying back and forth across the water, the airplanes circling low on their approach to Logan Airport, and of course, the lighthouses.  Boston Light, located on Little Brewster Island was the first lighthouse to be built in what is now the United States.  It’s celebrating its 300^th anniversary this year.  Grave’s Light, built in 1905, is a newbie by those  standards.  But when you stand on the mounds of an old fort and look across the bay to the two sentinels, it’s as if they’ve been there always, as if back in some ancient time, they thrust up from the sea.

The pictures came out pretty, but the visit itself was more important to me.  "Just what the Doctor ordered," as my father used to say.  I drove home and finished a draft of my current project.