My window ledge is full of beach treasures, fortunes from fortune cookies, and plastic musical instruments. If you zoom in you can see a metal tag that I picked up off the sand. It says "Joy Equipment Protection." Joy definitely needs to be protected. So protect yours, okay?
Winter has come to Southern California. The high here today was 59, and the foam from the churned up ocean almost looks like snow. And we do have snow, actually--on the mountain tops. I'm running around bundled up the way we Californians do. Wool sweater, scarf, insulated boots. It must look ridiculous so someone visiting from New England, say. But California houses (at least the ones I've lived in) are not well-insulated and so it's hard to get cozy even when you're inside out of the wind.
I'm glad the wind did not deter me from my beach walk this morning.
Note the quarter in the upper right as a size reference.
It was a wild, windy day with white caps, diving pelicans, shrieking terns, and lots of people (probably holiday visitors) who looked rather chilly in their light clothing. I wore a fleece jacket and a hooded sweatshirt over my wool sweater. If you've had to shovel snow today, or deal with a car that wouldn't start, or slipped and fell on the ice, or waited for the bus in below freezing temperatures you can have a good long laugh at my expense. And maybe think about a trip to a place that looks like this.
I found a spider crab shell on the beach last week. Purplish pink with the horn-like protuberances seen in the video above, it was too weird (and too large--bicycle helmet sized) to pocket. I poked it with a stick and flipped it over. Alas, it was not a shell that had been molted, but a casket for the remains of a creature who perished. Not picking it up was a wise decision. Even after the waves cleaned it out, I didn't want it in my arms.
I feel like I'm molting. Dashing around to distract myself while there are bigger things happening as the second anniversary of Dan's death approaches. Yesterday it was as if I stepped out of bed and into chasm, dropping down into a place airless and dark. I lay on the couch and dozed, too stupefied to read or muster the good sense to go out for a walk, meditate, or do anything.
Today it felt as if the sun was pouring in despite the May-gray skies here, yet there are more dealings with the dead. Another beneficiary form to fill out as we close my mother's last bank account. And her supplementary insurance continues to send emails (despite my emails announcing her death and the attaching of a jpeg of her death certificate.) They're asking for her to sign the cancellation form, asking if she'd agree to serve on some patient panel and fill out questionnaires about how they're doing. While I'd like to impersonate her and participate with scathing commentary, I don't have the heart for it right now. Darn. I know an opportunity for a heck of a good time when I see one, right?
From the New Yorker
Meanwhile, I continue to tend to my health. Beset with swollen knees, fingers, and hands and in pain since I returned from final visit with my mother in Iowa in March, blood tests show no Lyme disease, no autoimmune diseases. I have paid my thousand dollar bill and have letters from my primary care physician and a rheumatologist proclaiming the good news. A week ago I took my swollen self to a Functional Medicine doctor. Of course he told me to change my diet. No dairy. No gluten. ( I used to be a gluten free vegetarian, but converted back to being a regular omnivore about a year ago.) My cynical self didn't want to believe that I needed to give up dairy and gluten, (I mean, c'mon, it seems like such a knee-jerk alternative thing) but my desperate self was, well, desperate. After two days the swelling in my knees and fingers was pretty much gone. My right hand is still deciding whether or not to go with the miracle. But maybe it's lagging behind because it actually poured the milk and put the toast in the toaster.
And back to the molting--my caregiver skin is nearly shed. Another form/email or two and I am something new. The ex-wife skin, while only able to be gotten rid of when either or both The Someone and myself meet the same fate as the crab I found on the beach, feels like there's been at least some exfoliation or a nip and a tuck. July holds its own treacherous anniversary. This year it will be nine years since my marriage ended with a three-sentence conversation. I lost my husband, my family, my house, my town. Three decades of personal history became a fraud. Half my life felt like a hallucination.
But I'm all right now. Quite wonderful, in fact. A new person, alive and well. There is that chasm. But I think I can remember to climb out.
It's windy here again in paradise. Just a few minutes ago I Googled "Least windy place in Ventura County." The palm trees are blown out like windsocks, all their fronds pointed in one direction. It was impossible to walk on the beach this morning, and at least one day last week left me wondering if I'd scratched my corneas by trying. But there was a morning or two wherein I could inspect the wreckage wrought by wind and waves. It looked like this.
Gulls mining the wreckage
There's one of everything on the sand on a day like the one above. One sock. One glove. One shoe. A plastic shovel. A sand toy of some sort. An immense tree trunk. Bungee cord. Pair of glasses. Shorts. A t-shirt. A tire, a towel. And there were quite a few large crabs. Hence, the gulls.
The day I got my eyes full of sand there were petals. Rose petals. There was quite a trail of them, staggering on and on as if Ophelia had wandered there before throwing herself into the deep. I couldn't seem to get a good photo of the big picture of the entire winding road of yellow, pink, peach, white, and red.
I always wonder about the flower petals I find on the sand. It's a thing. Quite regular, especially on Mondays. Maybe a wedding. Maybe the scattering of someone's ashes. The effect is definitely ceremonial.
I've been doing my own dig through the wreckage. But unlike many people my age, I'm not collapsing under the weight of a parent's probated house stuffed to the rafters with possessions that have lost their meaning. My mom moved around. She broke up housekeeping and then broke it up again and again. By the time she made it to my house in California and then left here for a nursing home in Iowa, all I was left with was a closet shelf of boxes.
It was solemn and joyful and mysterious and surprising to open those boxes. Oh, there were boring parts and maddening parts, but there were beautiful sweet notes in greeting cards, so clearly chosen carefully for her. There were coins saved for no apparent reason, and hundreds of pretty postage stamps torn from letters. Old photos, of course, our baptismal certificates, and trinkets. But this was my favorite thing:
My mom never made it beyond the 8th grade. She began a string of jobs after that--most of them are mentioned HERE.
We all leave a trail behind us when we leave this life. Some of it wreckage, some of it rose petals.
Back to blue. The wind has settled.
You could make bigger waves in your bathtub.
All day I thought what a perfect day to be out on a boat.
Still no response to my application to be a volunteer docent for the Channel Islands National Park.
Once upon a time I had a husband and young children.
We took a vacation to Cornwall and there was a church buried in the sand.
In this time before my beach life, I wondered how this could happen. Who/What/How would a church become buried in the sand?
This is not a church. It's a bathroom.
I understand now.
How the wind moves the sand and we get tired of putting it back.
The tide was out when I walked on the beach today. I could walk/swim a little to the breakwater, I thought. I love my impulsive urges and I'm glad that I act on fewer of them.
When I got home, the marina looked like a bathtub that someone had pulled the plug on. How deep is it, I wondered. What if someday, I looked out my window and saw the boats sitting on the ground?
I still pick up heart-shaped rocks and beach glass. The hearts are so numerous now they are stacked two and three deep. There is a tower of hearts in the center. . And today I found an orange piece of beach glass. Not amber. Orange. Orange is my favorite color.
Beach glass. Heart rocks. I find them lying at my feet. How lucky is that?
The ocean is a gargantuan beast, its many mouths yawning tall with foamy tongues stretching farther and farther onto the sand. Not green or blue or silver or gray, all the churning has turned the beast brown. Life guard stations have been pulled from its reach, and where they once stood now lie what the beast has coughed onto the sand. Driftwood resembling half-devoured serpents. Tangles of twigs like flattened birds' nests, each with its own cache of plastic detritus, proving once more that we humans are the great sulliers of the universe. Green, red, blue, yellow. Bottle lids and their evil companion pull-tabs. Straws, strings with their flaccid balloons, pens, piñata leavings, Tic-Tac boxes, half shredded take-out containers. Tiny shards and nubbins of who-knows-what. The beast has regurgitated it all at our feet.
"You have to learn AND you have to teach,"she said. I said I guessed that was an opportunity.
"It's an opportunity, AND it's a problem!" she said and then laughed uproariously.
Well, it's certainly an opportunity to be at Grandma's house by yourself where you can be an only child for a change and take over the kitchen island with a box full of toys that once belonged to your aunts.
This girl is an animal lover, and as you can see, she has been well-loved herself.
She's a good beach walker and treasure hunter too.
And I found the largest heart, so far, for my collection. Yes, I did.
Today is one of those southern California mornings when I fee a certain responsibility to get the word out. Walk here if you have to. Crawl over the Rockies on hands and knees. This is what awaits.
And when you get here you can walk on water.
I don't know why the sky looks yellow in this photo. It was really the blue of the photo above.
The islands are sinking into the mist as the sky's curtains draw across the setting moon. Footsteps sinking into the cold sand, I stoop for plastic. Into my empty coffee mug I deposit drinking straws, their stripes faded like old circus tents. A rainbow of plastic caps. A shotgun shell. Remnants of wet cellophane, each piece gleaming like a jellyfish in the angled morning light. Flaccid strips of bright ruined balloons mimic worms, and I wonder if the willets and curlews I watch at the water's edge gobble them up sometimes by mistake, their bellies filling like those fated birds on that far away atoll whose innards are stuffed with caps and Bic lighters and Barbie parts, gestating death. An impromptu burial mound materializes in my path. Feather and shell and bone. A beak. I keep walking. Later, half washed away, is a child's construction of driftwood, stick, and stone--proof, I guess, that we are better at building than maintaining. Just steps from the last trash can, I find him. A blue plastic soldier, missing an arm and most of a leg, his gun still clutched in his remaining hand. Not sure if he's evidence of childhood innocence or destruction's harbinger, I put him in my pocket and carry him home.
A peak inside the big glass bowl where I deposit my beach treasures
To lay the metaphor at your feet seems too obvious. But there really is treasure everywhere. Some buried. Some glinting like morning neon begging to be dropped into your empty coffee cup and carried home.
I've seen a tern snatch a silver fish out of silver water. I've seen the bustle of Main Street in the next town up the coast where it seems to be fashionable to sell art and socks, books and journals, soap and scoops of French lavender, coffee, furniture, and antiques all under one chic roof. I've seen a dog people there call "Care Bear" who trots the streets with a stuffed animal in his mouth, a free spirit seemingly belonging to no one and everyone. I've seen myself looking at beach beauties with envy. I've seen people crawling through a hole in the fence by the cordoned off sand dunes and asked if they've ever been "prosecuted under the full extent of the law." No, they said. They just go to look at the great horned owls who nest in the trees. There are five, they said. I went for a look, myself. But I turned back when the third lizard raced across my sandaled feet.
I've seen beautiful historic buildings bearing earthquake bolts in their facades. My friend Ken, who used to be a building inspector, says that even after being seismically retrofitted, the buildings are still only strong enough to withstand a 5.5. I feel that I've been shored up to the same inadequate standard.
I've seen a little boy, five or six, clutching a boogie board like a shield while barreling across dry sand until he is ankle deep in the surf and then running back. The board never touches the water.
This is Margaritaville. This is the time of my loneliness. I am the dog, the boy, the future crumpled building, and, I hope, the fish holding its silver treasure. I am not the beach beauty. I'm not sure about the owls or the lizards. Maybe I'm them, too. Hiding. Nesting. Startled and on the run. "You're walking to the beach today if it kills you," I said aloud to my bowl of yogurt at breakfast. So I did. I broke free from my inner Stepford wife who has no husband but a zillion little chores, and I walked back to my least favorite restaurant for lunch, simply because I can get there by strolling on the sand. I sat at the bar, and I ordered a Caesar's salad and a glass of Chardonnay. Do you know the most popular cocktail that people order at a hotel bar on the beach? Yup. People are so literal. And hopeful, I suppose.
Seems like it should have sand on the rim of the glass, doesn't it? But no one would want it then.
I have a beach ball-sized empty jar. I don't know why I keep moving this thing from place to place, I said to Ken as I put it on my patio. Because someone made it by hand? he said, knowing he was telling me what I already know.
I have a book about Vermeer and his paintings, and this one called Allegory of Faith
made me think of that jar. The text says that the suspended glass globe symbolizes man's capacity to believe in God. I don't know anything about God, but I want to fill my jar with the shells, rocks, sticks, and plastic toys I find on the sand. Today I picked up a smooth gray rock, a rock with pink flecks, a small piece of driftwood and a blue plastic shovel. Tomorrow, if I can make myself leave the house, I have faith that I'll find more.
