This is the memory palace. I'm Nate de Mayo.

She had just turned 15 when her family all moved to the rock. I could call it an island,

it isn't island, but to say Aide Lewis and her family moved to an island might leave you with

the wrong impression and put the wrong images in your head. She and her family moved to a rock.

The craggy bump of New England limestone poking out of the water in the middle of a narrow

neck of Narragansett Bay off Newport, Rhode Island. Just big enough for a modest lighthouse

and a modest regular house for a modest family. Her father was a sailor. He piloted a revenue

cutter for the U.S. government doing customs enforcement. A strapping sea captain in Aide's youngest

days, but he got old fast, had a bad heart. And in his early 50s he had to come ashore.

It was 1854 and he was assigned to the new lighthouse on Limerock.

And you should know that Limerock is just a few hundred meters from the mainland on one side,

because there will be times in the story when you might picture Aide Lewis all alone in the middle

of nowhere. There may be times when you'll be swept away and it will seem like this lighthouse

is away from all civilization, beset by forces natural and existential. So keep this picture in mind.

A white lighthouse, a white house, on a white rock. Just offshore from a bustling seaside town.

Close enough in fact that every morning I'd it could take the weather robot down from the hooks

where it hung on the side of the weathered White House. In Roher younger sister and brother

across the channel to go to school in town. School was done for Ida. And then she'd return to

Limerock and help her mother get the house in order and her father get the light ready for the night

before taking the boat down again to pick the kids up and roll them back. About a thousand feet in

each direction is the golf line but longer often depending on the tide or current or the

chop in the channel in her angle of attack. There were days her parents would watch their teenage

...