ON LIGHTHOUSE KEEPING

there was a little boy who lived with his grandfather by the sea. in the early mornings, the boy would wake and go to the shore of the ocean to watch the water rise and fall. he would wake early, just before the sun came up, so that he could be back in his room and pretend to have been in bed by the time his grandfather awoke and began to grind his coffee. each morning this happened, and each morning it was the same: the boy would rise, and he would sit and watch the ocean and sometimes draw animals in the sand with a piece of driftwood. each morning, he would walk back, and reach the door of his house, and shake the sand from his shoes next to his grandfather's fruit-tree orchard, and then he would tiptoe into the house, quietly open his door and close it, and sit in silence until he heard his grandfather stir. 

it was in this time that he did those little things that eventually shaped him into the man he would become. sometimes he would open a notebook and draw the birds he had seen picking up scraps of sea-creatures from the rocks. sometimes he would close his eyes and imagine what sorts of shores lay further across the water. and sometimes he would open a book and read short stories of the kind that he most enjoyed: beasts, and demons, and bloodthirsty monsters, and the sorts of things that would freeze his clean blood cold and make him feel secure in the normalcy of warmth that he normally felt enclosed in, that was so far from that sort of cold. sometimes he would just lie in bed, and doze off for a minute or two before again waking, and between his lids and his eyes would flash images of things he had never seen yet suspected might exist, because the power of the ocean reminded him of the potential for power in all things in the world around him. because he was young, and because he hadn't seen much, he imagined that the world around him was stocked full of the most horrific things, and the most violent things, and also the most forgiving and beautiful and vibrant.

it wasn't that he was afraid of what his grandfather would say if he found out that the boy was making these walks to the ocean. it was that this - this watching of the sea - was something all his own, and he knew that if his grandfather knew about it, he would stop going: not because he would get in trouble, but because the sea wouldn't look the same to him.

his grandfather never asked him about the pile of sand by the roots of his fruit trees. the pile grew and grew until all that could be seen above it was the fruit itself. one walking past might assume, if having no understanding of such things, that apples and pears and peaches grew out of mountains of sand. and thus said passerby might come to assume that the sand in those parts, so near the ocean, contained nutrients more conducive to the birth of colorful fruits than any other kind of soil around. said passerby might assume that the sand had such power in it that the trees themselves would have no need for oxygen, for they were breathing in a magic that was more than any lung could ever hold. 

when the rains came, the sand grew wet, and the boy went outside with a spoon and a rake and a shovel. he shaped the sand into a castle, and inside the castle were the fruit trees, their trunks freed and provided with air and yet enclosed in something majestic by nature and created by the boy's sense of wonder and that sense of wonder in and of itself. in this way, the materials needed for the building of a most beautiful kind of shelter came from none other than the boy's imagination and his inclination towards curiosity and his dedication to his own private and secret mode of passing his early morning hours.