The Art of the Sea

 

 

All the talk of summer is over. We are on to other things. But I will remember a season that ended with a perfect arc. Like the crescent moon, barely visible on September 21st, summer passed away mid-sentence, ending only with a luminous comma in the sky.  

 

 

 

On this last day of summer my husband and his sister headed for the waves. We don't live near the ocean, and it's always a special event. As much to be savored and appreciated as family when we visit both together.

 

 

 

 

I don't bathe in the ocean. It has a different appeal for me. I hung back and felt the rhythm and pulse as I walked alongside instead. The beach was empty, and I began to feel that the sea had a message for me.

 

 

 

 

 

I was thinking of another message from the night before. We had Chinese for dinner, and my fortune cookie announced to me that "you will be content by the end of summer." I smiled and thought that it was quite likely, since I was not discontented, and the season was all but over.

 

I strolled along, alone with my thoughts in a way that I had probably not been all year long. Alone in nature is different than solitude anywhere else.

 

 I thought of the morning with my aged mother in law, and of her walker. She and many of her companions push them along where she lives. They have handy baskets like a bicycle. Or a baby stroller. And it seemed like a natural phase of life that way. The strollers were lined up outside rides at Disneyland earlier in summer, and now walkers were lined up outside the dining hall of a retirement community just the same. It got me all awhirl with thoughts of wheels and cycles and seasons past and present and yet to come all ocurring together. 

 

Perhaps my thoughts were enhanced a little by the vision we had seen, my husband, his mother, and I, as we toddled along at a ninety-year-old pace on the way to lunch. We were crossing a quiet street in the small community. There was a vague sound of a plane flying overhead that we hardly paid any attention to as we were watching our steps. And then suddenly my husband exclaimed, "Oh my gosh it's the space shuttle!"

 

We stopped in our tracks right in the middle of the street, all making exclamations at the piggy-backed miracle accompanied by two other planes sailing so slowly above the tree tops. We had a good field of vision, and a long euphoric moment passed as we tried to take it all in together. We had timed our walk serendipitously to coincide with Endeavor taking its final soaring 

journey along the southern coast of California to its final resting place, the end of its own season.

 

 

 

So now, at the end of day, the eleventh hour of summer, I looked to the sea, searching for its gifts as you do when you are there, and wondered what it would tell me.

The waves and grass and seaweed made forms on the sand like tea leaves in a cup.

 

 I half expected to find a word or two spelled out.

 

 

 

 

 

No sooner would I be engrossed in reading the shore and a wave would wash its message away out to sea. 

 

 

 

But eventually the art of the sea gave up its whispered missive. Wave after wave. Piece by piece, and unprofound. 

 

In the arcs and swirls, and foreign seeming vegetation. . .

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

It was only a message of peace. And of beauty. . . .

 

And of content. . . .

 

 

 

 

 

I hope your week is just as sweet! 

 

Jacqueline