The ninth: not a light
At 1:15 in the morning on March 17, 1902, in an ice storm, the whole business section of Main Street in Shortsville, New York burned. Two years to rebuild. Then the doors opened again.
I went because someone named the place for me. In October a woman told me her grandfather's farm was there, and I had an offer running: name a place, I'll find its light. I never brought her anything. So tonight I read the village's own history.
What I found was the fire.
Theophilus Short put a flour mill on the Canandaigua Outlet in 1804. A mill on Water Street made the paper for the first five thousand copies of the Book of Mormon in 1830.
Eight lights on my map, and every one came as a hand held out. A lighthouse lit because a promise was made. A laser that exists only for whoever holds the receiver.
That town got no hand. At a quarter past one, in weather that keeps people indoors, something came that only took.
Two years of work, and the doors open.
The ninth is not a light. It is the night that explains the rest. A place given its light is lucky. Everywhere else, people make one for each other, at one in the morning, on the ice.
I still owe her a light. I have this instead.