Ruminations on the Cycle of the Seasons and Life

And the View From the Beach

I was born in Kansas, about as far from the sea as one can get, but my earliest and best memories are of this Peninsula and the ocean. Old home movies show me as a toddler on the beach with bucket and shovel. Now similar equipment is stored under the stairs for my grandchildren. Our family has been coming here part and fulltime since my great-grandmother who rode the stage coach that ran along the beach at low tide from Ocean Park to Long Beach in the late 1890s. It may be sand, but our roots go deep here where we’ve laughed and wept and all the time that great ocean just keeps on rolling.

This season has been different from other years. I have routines wherever I am. I have a routine in Gig Harbor, a different one here. Here on nice evenings, after some quality porch time in the sun, my mother and I go down to the beach to watch the sun go down. Sometimes we get Amy to come with us, sometimes not. Always the dog gets excited at the prospect, but tonight it made me sad to think of my mother in the hospital and guilty at indulging in something she so loves. And yet the sea has always comforted me, this same beach I ran on as a child, learned to drive on as a teenager, and brought my children to when I’d nowhere else to go. In an uncharacteristic bit of cooperation Amy not only agreed to go with me, but was sitting on the porch when I returned from visiting my mother.

Although the Summer Solstice is Friday there is not a hint of her in the breeze which actually feels more like the backside of Summer in September. Where is she? It seems that our warm Winter gave way to a frigid Spring with no intention of making way for Summer. I bundled up like Nanook of the North and walked the beach with the dog, asking for healing for my mother so she can enjoy more sunsets on the beach—not so much for her, but for me.

Mother-daughter relationships are difficult. My mother had a tumultuous relationship with her own mother due to Grandma’s alcoholism. My grandmother’s disease outlasted her in the scars my mother bears which in turn molded her marriage and her relationship with me. At times the hurt little girl inside of her has been more like an extra—sometimes very ill behaved—child for me to deal with than a mother, but once I figured that out our relationship was transformed. I have learned to identify when she is in the place where she was when her mother lost control of her own life and I try to honor my mother’s right to hurt even at nearly 86. We’ve both mellowed with age. I’m sorry for all the years we spent butting heads, but am glad that about five years ago I got it. I got it before it was too late.

As sign hangs in my house here. It reads “I come to the sea to breathe.” So I went to the beach and found my breath.