This Tuesday’s prompt at the writing workshop was a little embroidered felt yurt ornament and a small ceramic box shaped like a lighthouse that might have held kitchen matches. There were some interesting responses from the group, poems, a bit of fiction, a limerick, but I was too caught up in my taxes, don’t ask, to work on it until now. My first thought was about the Tibetans I had met while living in New York. They're the most beautiful and generous people, both physically and spiritually, I’ve ever known. There was one in particular who had lived in a yurt with his yak herding family until he came to America to make money to support them. He arrived not speaking a word of English and immediately had to learn to navigate the subways to get from the room he shared in Queens with another Tibetan to his job as a janitor at the store where I worked in Manhattan. Imagine. Not only did he have to deal with the noise and dirt and turbulence but abrasive New Yorkers as well. He'd just smile and nod and push his broom, he was the essence of gratitude.

I also thought of writing about the Tiny House movement because I'm fascinated by it having lived in a few tiny abodes myself. The Arkansas shack I mentioned a while back, and my first apartment in Soho that was 14x14 feet with the ceiling and walls all painted park bench green and felt like a forest cave. The cabin I had my first summer here was small too, it was half the size of my current living room but very cute.

But it was the ceramic lighthouse box that caught my attention. It was probably made in China, I didn’t look for a label, and no doubt had been bought in a tourist trap only to end up being sold again at a flea market or yard sale from a collection of knickknacks that decorated a kitchen shelf. Someone, or several someones, had taken the time to design and make it, then someone or several someones had bothered to buy it. And there it sat, along with an embroidered yurt ornament, on the table upstairs in the library where our writing workshop meets in front of the big windows with the view of a real lighthouse out in the harbor.

We have three lighthouses in Provincetown. The one you see from the library is called Long Point, another at the west end of the harbor is known as Wood End, and the third at Race Point is on the ocean side beach off Herring Cove. All of them are picturesque and show up all the time in paintings and photographs of Cape Cod. They’re our Statue of Liberty, beacons, symbolic; although my favorite is the lighthouse is in Edgartown on Martha’s Vineyard because you can walk right up to it on the beach. I did it on a frigid gloomy February afternoon almost ten years ago. I’d gone there for a job interview and was so sure I had the gig I had put a deposit on a funny attic apartment, but it was not meant to be. I was heart-broken when it didn’t happen, but I've got over a hundred pictures I took that day, and the knowledge, at least now, that if it had happened I most likely wouldn’t have found my way here – how sad would that be?