Red Light - Green Light

When I was a young woman I visited my parent's house one summer, my two little girls with me. It was a cottage home, small, but cute. It rested within a beach front community in Youngstown, New York, located at the mouth of the Niagara River where it joins Lake Ontario. The beach sat down below a cliff, which we had access by stairs.

In the daytime, we could look across a great expanse of shimmering water. It felt so peaceful. Sometimes there were sailboats afloat. Occasionally, if we looked out far enough, we could see an occasional freighter ship running through the middle of the lake on it's way out to the St. Lawrence River to the Atlantic Ocean.

On a clear night my girls and I could sit at the edge of the cliff on the top step of the stairs, and view the black velvet water, thousands of stars sprinkled across it like sparkles glued upon a Halloween costume.

Without binoculars, straight across from us, about 40 miles away, we could see the lights of the city of Toronto, Canada. We often sat there lulled by the quietness of the starlight, the lapping of the water upon the shore, and the light breeze rustling the leaves on the huge oak tree in the back yard.

We could have lined a string directly across the lake to the brightly lit traffic signal that reliably changed every few minutes from green to red to yellow to green. It was hypnotic.



Photo of Toronto at Night by Richard Almasi