The Lighthouse Keeper's Daughter

On a trip to Nova Scotia, my husband and I stopped at a tiny lighthouse museum run by a woman in her eighties whose father had been the keeper there for thirty years.

She gave us a private tour, though there was no one else there. She showed us the brass lamp she polished as a girl, the logbook where her father wrote down every passing ship, and the little window seat where she used to read during storms.

At the top, she pointed to a rock in the harbor and said that's where she'd kissed her husband for the first time, in 1956. "He was a fisherman," she said. "He waved to the lighthouse every time he went out for fifty years."

We stayed three hours. She sent us off with a jar of blueberry jam and a hug. I think about her often, polishing that lamp, reading in the window, watching the ships come home.