In Search of The Missing Lighthouse Keeper Bill Whitelock slowed the boat so that we might see at a low tide the tombstones that lay just one foot or so now below the surface of the Bay more shallow than any but those more closely berthed might know. With eyes strained and necks bent like the egrets watching from wetlands just breaking the horizon line, we could glean through the briny blue- names, dates, and inscriptions; epitaphs on the eroded stones of a Holland Island graveyard reclaimed by waters of a relentless Chesapeake. We gave up on the second day. James Somers, our misplaced lighthouse keeper of Somers Cove Light was nowhere to be found. It was fitting this ancestor was not fixed to the little left of Holland. It was an outside chance, all along, for James belonged elsewhere on one of those “Islands out of Time”, more likely Smith’s than Tangier, but I must concede I’d found a few misplaced here and even on the distant mainland in and around what was first Annemessex and latter dubbed Somers Cove, and so some did meander for reasons their own. The sea also took a tribute then as now and that too was a possibility. I confess I’ve wondered why I care. Only a few of our folk comb and carefully record what for some is a strange sort of safeguarding. It may be a generation or more before another comes trolling to take their catch from the lines on which so many caught wriggle including the still misplaced lighthouse keeper, Jimmy, and a now departed but more easily reckoned though carefully cast me. I can feel their gratitude and thanksgiving through the coming time. It’s a well meant legacy from me to make their search all the easier, for I’ve known that good feeling of the helping, steadied hand even if it is but their crossed mark of one who has come and gone before. Perhaps I’m seeking some place in history, some link with what will come. I do not know. I only know I care, and that I feel a drive to privilege what is passed, what is passing, and what will come to pass, on and on, into the gods eye of time. For me time is as to the incoming tide, wave after wave, break after break, caressing sandy shores that billow on billow to strokes of an everlasting sea. “Remember me”. © 2008 by E.D. Ridgell	Memories That Will Not Die If they could not speak They just ran their hands o’er Traveler in a despairing goodbye. The old man, hat in hand, did not avert his blazing eyes. Eyes born of a woman buried alive. Eyes that had beheld too many who had died. The boxwoods at Strafford Hall, elephant eye-high just decades ago now slowly die of root rot. The memory of them does not. © 2009 by E.D. Ridgell "Remember upon the conduct of each depends the fate of all.” - Alexander the Great "I am for those who believe in loose delights, I share the midnight orgies of young men, I dance with the dancers and drink with the drinkers." – Walt Whitman
	Lord, Lay Me Down, Gently Now   I drank and drank and drank for months I think Trying to just find that place, that place for me; That resting place where I could be invisible- Where I could just lay flat and still, out of their way.   I lay me down in a corn field and let out a queer guffaw; I cut dead any shame with another laugh and came to rest. I reckoned back, when last a pretty boy, I lay on the lawn of Clifton Park And looked and looked and looked for that four leaf clover, that myth.   Lord, lay me down, gently now, on that field of catalpa pods and ash. Oh, Lordy, Lordy, Lordy but I’m worn down. I’m all used up, ya’ hear? Let Virginia showers mingle me with my true love, Let all the elements do what they will do for a final metaphor of it.   And what of our souls, Lord? Are they myths, too? Is there a special place for your chosen ones, your mistakes? Has this been some kind of carnival show? Were we their freaks? Lord, I would have it so again, for the freak stares out with no expectations. © 2009 by E.D. Ridgell