Happy birthday

to wicked_wish. It's been great fun getting to know you over the past year.

Waves

We convened at Cousin Kerry's house today. This was perfectly calculated to please everyone: they have a lovely house with a fine backyard equipped with a patio deck with furniture overlooking the garden, a trampoline, a swing, a basketball net and a hot tub. The kids kept up a steady bouncing on the trampoline for hours, but eventually, a subset of us decided to go to the beach, so we drove, in shifts, to Torrey Pines State Park Beach. Rob stayed, but the girls and I went.

I cannot remember specifically the last time that I walked into the ocean. Years. Decades, possibly. The one time I definitely remember was the trip taken to the east coast, when I was nine. And there was my travel across Europe, which included time spent in Greece, when I was twenty-one. There were probably times since then, but not any that I remember in much detail.

You must understand: I grew up near Lake Michigan, one of the largest lakes in the world, and so when I stand on a beach and see an expanse of water, so large that I can't see the opposite shore, I imagine it to be fresh water.

And yet I remember the taste of the sea. Taste it once, and then touch a few drops of that salty bitterness to the tongue again, years later, and the memory returns with a jolt: oh yes. The sea.

Rob's sisters Shannon and Erika and I stood in water knee deep and laughed as the waves washed over our legs. Strands of seaweed continually wound themselves around our ankles, and the pull of the water back from the receding waves kept making the sand shift and slither out from beneath our feet, so we could not simply stand, but kept walking toward the waves and stumbling back. Fiona had borrowed a boogie board and was rapidly making friends with the waves, but it took me awhile to immerse myself entirely. At first it was cold, but then as the water splashed further and further up my waist, I stopped sucking in a breath and standing on my toes as each wave came. I deliberately turned my back to the shore and walked in until I was wet from head to foot.

I spent a half hour watching the waves, walking into them, riding them back toward shore and walking out again as they hissed their way back to the sea. The sand was soft under my feet, but interspersed with hard smoothnesses--pebbles? Shells? The light shifted on the waves, sliding across the ever-changing surface, and the infinite variations of the interplay of gray and green and white reminded me of volcanic glass. A milky froth floated on the water's surface, loose strands of seaweed drifted just underneath, and in the depths, millions of suspended particles of sand caught the sunlight in ever-shifting golden flashes, like the flecks in goldstone. The tops of the waves shifted in cascades of curves, and then became angular, then jagged, and then crashed into foaming white power that rushed and tumbled and roared toward the shore. I walked out farther. The waves now lifted my feet from the sand and then dropped me back again, and the waves now crested over my head. Unafraid, I watched them come toward me, one after another, with a regular timeless rhythm which I knew would be relentless whether I ducked or ignored them or tried to turn to flee. Like breaths, I thought, like the rocking caresses of Mother Earth. I spat out the salty taste . . . and this is the taste of her blood, a flavor that all her children instantly recognize whenever they taste it again, no matter how many years it has been.