She Called Me an Enigma

Say you have a friend: you don't speak each other's first languages, and your command of your common language is shaky at best. But you are together in an unfamiliar place, and that bonds you together in a way that is both immediate and strong.

One day you are out walking, and as you pass a fruit stall, your friend picks up a plum. "I like these," he says. "They remind me of home." He cannot express why they remind him of his home, and you wonder: is it because he had a plum tree in his yard? Did he eat them after school? Or were they perhaps his mother's favorite? But you cannot ask this, so you point out some raspberries and say, "those are my favorites. They remind me of home, too."

You don't know how to say that this is because they grew in the yard of the house you grew up in, and that they were always ripe around your birthday. That you remember picking them barefoot with your brothers and your best friend, filling up what felt like every bowl in the house, and baking the berries into pies to give to the neighbors. Any of this is too much for you to say; there are too many gaps in your language. You and your friend both know this, so he nods, and you go along your way.

Soon it will be your friend's birthday.

You have not known him for long, and you will not know him much longer. Soon he will return home, to where he is understood, and you will do the same. You do not know much about his life or about his hometown—it is small, he says, you would not know it. You say the same to him about where you grew up—it's true. But you do know that he likes plums and frogs and the color purple, that he always orders a gin and tonic and that he never gets dessert. You know he wanted to draw comics but became a landscape architect instead, and that he's been in love before—of course he has, he says, he's twenty-three.

So you pick out a bag of juicy, deep purple plums and a pencil covered in frogs and you give them to him for his birthday. He smiles because you remembered, or perhaps because he is thinking also of someone else—you cannot know, and he cannot say. But he thanks you and offers you a plum, and you share the bag sitting in the sunlight, and he uses the pencil down to a stub.

And later, on your birthday, when it is almost time to say goodbye, he brings you a pastry (you always get dessert), and when you bite into it, there is raspberry jam inside. You smile for being thought of, and for the memory of baking pies, and he smiles back at you.

"Good?" he asks.

"Very good," you answer. "Thank you."

Even in the house it was LOUD.  Probably the loudest thing I have ever experienced but at a normal, predictable interval.  You would begin to time your sentences with little pauses with the rest of the lighthouse crew so you would talk like this while making your………..HORN…………. tea and then carry on talking because you knew when it would go off.  It rattled the walls and the dishes in our cabinet.

At least one girl had died there. They kept photos of her everywhere “in honor of her sacrifice” because she had decided to take the winter watch alone and died in a storm where bounders the size of mini vans had been lifted out of the ocean and left scattered across the island, to say nothing of the ice chunks.  People weren’t allowed to be alone on the watch after that.

One day a dead moose washed up on shore and it took my entire crew all day but we managed to rig up a line to hang it up to dry because we thought having a moose skeleton in the house would really spice the living room up a bit.  It did.  Weird shit happens when six of you are left alone, like ALONE ALONE, no cell reception, no wifi, just a radio to contact the real world and not a lot of reason to do that.  People don’t go on lighthouse jobs if they want to stay connected, I’ve found.