The Ledge Light – What sends a farm girl to sea, to find her way masquerading as a man, to one of the lonely rocks of the Long Island Sound? A broken heart, a thirst for adventure? Follow Martha Green from a Franklin Farm to the Ledge Light in New London.
Excerpt:
For a person who doesn’t believe in a god or an afterlife or anything more than what I can see and touch, I find it oddly unnerving that there are places where I feel I’ve lived in another life, where when I ride down the road I think I’ve done this before in a carriage with horses, or I’m so comfortable in a neighborhood that I think I’ve been there before, long, long before. If there is such a thing as reincarnation, I don’t think I was, as some people imagine themselves, a princess or a queen, a lady-in-waiting, king or nobleman; I was probably a charwoman, a serf, or a poor and struggling waif.
I would have been a logger or mountaineer or farmer or fisherman or lighthouse keeper… and that is what I became, a keeper of the light. For as much as I need people, my need for quiet and solitude is greater. Some people may feel a discomfort within themselves when they are alone and feel complete only when others are with them. My comfort within my own skin, my own skull, is complete in solitude. It is not just the hustle and bustle of cities or town centers that I dislike; it is the chatter of idle minds who are uncomfortable with silence and endeavor to fill any quiet moment with amiable conversation.