So, I got to thinking how much I enjoy reading about other “day in the life” stories and thought I’d share a sample of ours here. While the other day was not necessarily a typical one it was the simple sort we try to experience on a frequent basis. And since readers share with me the pleasure of living vicariously through our lighthouse experiences, here you are.

It started as a foggy morning here on the coast of Maine, which was not altogether unusual except for its soupiness. Upon waking with the lighthouse barely visible through our bedroom window Linda and I decided upon an impromptu stroll down the lane from the keeper’s cottage. I snatched my film camera loaded with a black and white roll and headed out the door to snap some photos from our front porch. Linda soon joined me and then we grabbed our smartphones to head out for some digital shots, such as the one pictured above. 

What unfolded was a special time for us since the thick fog scared off the usual morning visitors to our point on the peninsula. We thus had the entire area to ourselves as we leisurely navigated the mile or so down to the stone pillars marked Land’s End, where we turned around and then headed homeward, negotiating the rocky coast enveloped in misty fog and capturing it all with snapshots in time. 

Far from a distraction for us, photography is a means of documenting our lives at the lighthouse. As Gretchen Rubin writes in Happier at Home, “To eke out the most happiness from an experience, we must anticipate it, savor it as it unfolds, express happiness, and recall a happy memory, and photographs are a very helpful tool for prompting happy memories.” And it is fun sharing them with you all here. 

Upon arriving at home, we hopped in the car and headed to our general store for a hearty pancake breakfast before returning to our seaside cocoon and cozying up with reading material and relaxing tunes as the fog gradually lifted to the delight of several late-coming visitors. It was not entirely out of the ordinary but a special day nonetheless. As Benjamin Franklin said, “Happiness consists more in small conveniences or pleasures that occur every day, than in great pieces of good fortune that happen but seldom.” 

Finally, William Channing also espoused such a lifestyle: “To live content with small means, to seek elegance rather than luxury, and refinement rather than fashion; to be worthy, not respectable, and wealthy not rich, to study hard, think quietly, talk gently, act frankly…in a word, to let the spiritual, unbidden, grow up through the common.” And if our lives are likened to an ocean, then our days are waves, and they are guided by the rhythms of the tides.