On the Waterfront (for Susan)

 

“In three words I can sum up everything I've learned about life: 

it goes on.” Robert Frost 

It's been a while since I sat down to the keyboard. Funny thing. I have much more time now than I used to. But the minutes and hours and days between pressing work have been unsettling. I now can catch my breath, but have had to completely stop to recover my words.

Retirement is not relaxation. It is a process that is hard work. So much of who we are revolves around what we do. When that stops, it leaves an anxious, vacuous, ghostly quiet, full of questions I could no longer answer easily, and lists from down deeper that needed making. So I've been letting those waves catch up to me; wash over me; push and pull me along as I find my footing. 

I missed the plants. 

I was sure the plants missed me.

I had learned to read time in the 

tips of buds, 

swelling from one day to the next,

in the phases of the moon across the weeks and months,  

in the changes of light and colors across the seasons.

Lucky for me I landed at the water.

"For whatever we lose (like a you or a me), 

it's always our self we find in the sea."

- E.E. Cummings

Slowly I am finding my way back.  It's all here to be rediscovered and reincorporated. Moments are measured by the swell and ebb of the waves, or an unbroken shell on the beach. Hours are metered by the building clouds, lowering sky, that final shaft of sunlight, the cool calm colors of clearing. 

  

The moon is still here waxing and waning across the days and weeks. The sun still calculates the angles and degrees of the seasons.  

The natural world holds me captive, and continually captivated by the details.

The questions are all inside. The answers are there, too. My lifeline has always been my sweet, ocean going fisherman of a husband, who is ecstatic with our relocation.  I have found buoyancy in the smiles of my grandchildren. They, too, help me refocus on the horizon, with changes, small, smaller, and huge.  

 

While I float a bit to find my bearings, I am right where I need to be. Stroke, breathe, stroke. I'm almost there.

“The best way out is always through.”
― Robert Frost