Bill and I took a little respite from our Indiana winter and went to Florida for a week. We fortunately landed on a week of sunny and perfect 75 degree days. It was just the two of us, so we had no schedule and no hurry. Bill got in his usual 10,000 steps almost every day, and I got reading and writing done and absorbed the delicious sunshine.
About our main decision for each day was where we would eat dinner. Two of those dinners we shared with dear friends who were in the area. We also saw a great movie and watched the Indiana football team win the college finals of the Peach Bowl. Indiana has historically been famous for basketball, but this year the whole
country was talking about Indiana football for a good reason.
I am a water person. I grew up in Michigan surrounded by lakes, in a state that is surrounded by lakes bigger than most of the seas of the world—and those Great Lakes are filled with fresh water.
But there is nothing in nature I love more than the ocean and the sand that surrounds it. I spent my mid-day sitting with my books (Cindy Morgan’s The Year of Jubilee and Richard Rohr’s The Tears of Things), and my journal, at a patio table where I could watch people parasailing, the children playing in the sand, and the teen-agers tossing frisbees and playing volleyball.
I couldn’t help missing our kids and grandkids and their childhoods on all the beaches of our lives.
When they were little, I always packed a bag of plaster of Paris in my craft bag. I would mix the plaster powder with tap water, then press their little feet into wet beach sand and pour the prints full of plaster. When these were dried thoroughly, I’d take them to the cottage and keep them on the counter until it was time to go home. Over the years, I had footprints hanging on the playroom wall that began small, then got bigger and bigger as they walked almost to the ceiling.
Today I could see those footprints in the sand, getting bigger as they walk away from me into the far beach of the horizon. I can’t help seeing each of them—our kids and their kids—from infancy to now, more than half a century of being our child and grandchild.
This life is a telescope extending into a vision of the future. I hold the eyepiece close, adjusting the focus, trying to bring the future of each of them—and the two of us—into view. But I can’t bring the future into focus. Each section of the scope has to be lived in its own time. I have to be satisfied with staying focused on the now-piece of the extending telescope. Grateful I am for this piece, this clear vision of today only.
Here at the beach, like all the beaches of our lives, I can only pick up a jar full of perfect or broken shells, shells of things that, too, have a living history. I will take them home and pour them in the garden that encircles our backyard fountain and little pool. Come spring, I will revisit these beach days when I turn over the soil to plant a new season of seeds.
