The light of the late afternoon was fading...yet the illuminated paintings grabbed me as I walked by the window and held me there...lost in the seacoast.

While in Boston a few years ago on a business trip...I had to stay over the weekend. Always when you are out of town, away from your family on a weekend...the mood turns towards that feeling of something missing...a nagging in your gut that somethings not right. Alone in the city leaves one with a longing for connections but as you walk down the city streets...people pass by with their own destinations...filling their own needs...oblivious to anyone around them.

The afternoon light was like a beacon directing me to the paintings. They were my escape. I was transported to the seacoast...a world completely foreign to a Midwesterner. I took a mental journey down the beach just off the porch...where I could go for miles in either direction. On the horizon were the bleach white sails billowing in the ocean breeze with a distant laughter of couples running and teasing each other as they ventured out into the foam...a foam creeping farther inland with each wave. As the night grew darker...the lighthouse beacon shone brighter and brighter...one flash of the beacon and my concentration was broken with the piercing sound of a siren headed for Massachusetts General down the street.

The window, dark now, but at least for a few brief moments the seacoast that my appointments and deadlines stole from me, was given back to me by the paintings. Tomorrow I would head home to family and the green rolling hills of Indiana.