I'm a firm believer that things come into your life when you're meant to have them. I'm not talking big spiritual concepts, here, but things. Stuff. A lamp, in this case--one I brought home from an old cottage slated for demolition the other day. This thing is made from a ten-inch tall lobster claw mounted on a simple block of wood. It's so big, in fact, I though it was plastic or maybe fiberglass, but a lobsterman friend of mine assured me it is (or more accurately "was"), a claw belonging to a very big, and very old lobster. Close to a hundred years, was his guess.
Now, the fact this thing had been in the cottage for at least 25 or 30 years prior to my taking it home, means it's really 125-130 years old, which puts the birth of the thing somewhere around 1885. That's about 20 years after the end of the Civil War. Freaky.
Anyway, something about the thing spoke to me--I mean other than a rather bizarre level of kitsch. Because it's a lobster. Get it? If you don't, you're clearly not reading my blog enough. Because
Matinicus, my double mystery due out in May, is about life on an island of lobstermen gone wrong. An island of outsized problems, you might say. Gotta be a sign, don't you think?
