Article and Photograph by Make The Days Count Contributor Marie Monroe

 

I’m a photographer.  So I spend a lot of time looking at my hometown with an eye for photos.  I like to drive, or have my friend drive, while I look around with a ‘fresh eye’ at my usual surroundings. 

 

Sometimes I venture into a neighborhood that’s off my beaten path just to see what I might see and capture.  I’ve learned a great deal about my town this way as well as any other place I visit when traveling.  While I look mostly for the scenery and its objects, I also learn about the people in these places from seeing their surroundings and what they’ve placed there.

 

On a very windy and cold day this winter I was driving in an older, more rundown section of town looking for photos.  I’ve always been attracted to the patina of older buildings and objects and found myself in an urban area where industrial and residential properties sit side by side. 

 

Among the chain link fences, protective barbed wire, scraps of abandoned building supplies and dilapidated buildings, I found a sign hanging in an old, seemingly abandoned storefront window.  It said, “LOVE.”  The more I looked, the more I learned about whoever had left this message. 

 

The sign was crafted of metal in now rusty block letters.  There were Christmas lights wrapped around each letter.  I could imagine the word, LOVE, twinkling in the night, projecting a powerful reminder to any passerby on this deserted and frozen street.  I wondered who might walk past here.  Where would they be going?  Where would they be coming from?  What would it feel like on this lonely, abandoned street at night?

 

These wonderings brought me close in heart and mind to whoever had crafted and hung that sign - a sort of lighthouse in a forgotten nook of my city.  That sign is a twinkling message of hope and a reminder that whatever one’s lack, what is in one’s heart is the real possession to treasure.

 

I took the picture and it remains one of my favorites.  I’ve never seen the sign lit and twinkling out its message in the night, but I still think about whoever hung that sign.  Like a lighthouse keeper I imagine that, at night, he comes into his shop, now long closed for business, just to remind the passersby that this cold and lonely world is not really so.  Lighthouse keepers are a special and rare breed.  They care for the faceless, nameless people at sea.  And those at sea rely upon them.  It is an arrangement of honor and commitment.  The beacon shines and the voyagers come safely home to their safe harbor. 

 

My travels through my city have shown me countless voyagers.  Lonely ones.  Happy couples.  Children in great joyous tumbling packs on bikes and scooters and skateboards…

 

I’ve seen homeless people, frightened people, angry people and people who seem lost in ways not geographic.  I wonder what their travels have been and will be.  I wonder what their stories are.

 

Sometimes I have prayed for them, very quickly as I pass by and catch a glimpse of something heavy and difficult.

 

I am not a lighthouse keeper.  I am something of a treasure hunter.  I find things that don’t seem to matter and show them in a way that I hope says they do.  I look for the beauty that we forget is there.  I like to be reminded that the discarded and old are also the beautiful and the precious.  In my mind, this applies to buildings, objects, cities and people.  I want it to apply to me …

 

No, I am not a lighthouse keeper.  I am more the sea-going traveler.  I look for the glitter, twinkle and shine.  I watch for the beacon and I move toward it.  Beneath and behind the fog of my city’s forgotten streets, buildings and people, I see some light … and my camera celebrates it.

 

It is January and the temperatures in my city have dipped below freezing into single digits for some days now.  I wonder about those people I’ve passed - the ones who seem lonely and bearing something difficult.  I wonder if they have found the warmth of light to keep them safe. 

 

I wonder if they remember LOVE and feel its warmth. 

 

I wonder if my old shopkeeper has kept the beacon burning for them in our frozen city … In less than a month we will celebrate Valentine’s Day.  Already the stores are full of heart-shaped boxes and teddy bears.  Children are surveying the new batch of Valentines, choosing what to distribute to family and schoolmates.  The card racks are bursting with assorted LOVE. 

 

LOVE for husbands, LOVE for wives, LOVE for mother, LOVE for Dad, LOVE for children and LOVE for friends…

 

We come into the stores unwrapping ourselves and rubbing our frozen hands.  In the middle of this frozen time in our frozen city we are surrounded by LOVE.

 

“Inside my empty bottle I was constructing a lighthouse while all the others were making ships.”
-Charles Simic 

 

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