I lost track of time in the fog. I had wandered down a side road in my truck, filling time between dropping off and picking up one of my twins. The road ended at the water.

I got out and walked to the top of a set of wooden steps leading down to the beach. The fog hung thick, curtaining abandoned moorings anchored in glassed water mirroring gray sky. Evenly spaced birds lined a breakwater like school children properly spaced and waiting. What were they waiting for? Why such a proper line? Why face the same direction? Did they notice summer visitors lined for ice cream?

At the water’s edge, birds balanced on stick legs and pecked at wet sand. A few rocks broke the surface of the receding tide, barren islands protected by winged sentinels. The tops of erosion fences reached up from beneath burying sand. Two signs of equal size, both facing the same direction side by side, offered commentary on the state of things. One announced the beginning of the private beach, the other designated the end of the public beach. Two signs, one message: Stay Out.

Standing at the top of the steps, I heard two different vehicles pull up and leave. One played music over the radio, the other a news program. Each stayed only long enough to turn around at the dead end. Were they lost? Looking for solitude? Out for a drive, not a walk? Did they note the fog and figure there would be nothing to see?

It was the formation of flying birds appearing from the fog that held me. I watched their flight in anticipation of their disappearance. How often do we watch for the end? Read to turn the last page? Do something to have it behind us? How does remembering yesterdays and imagining tomorrows impact todays? When is being present reduced to standing in line? 

The fog curtains a smaller stage – one where we can absorb everything, where we are not distracted by the horizoned expanse of a clear day. There is something comforting about reduction. The window cracked to hear the rain clearly, a favorite blanket pulled to our chin, the crackle of the first fire of the season, tea still too hot to sip, and a book we have been waiting to begin. 

Cocooned, we are free to grow from who we were into who we are becoming, all the while considering who we are. The present: a third space born from past and future – impossible without their union and unlike either. Clarity comes from inhabiting a space small enough that we can touch the edges, and windowed by past and present, so we can see simultaneously what is behind and ahead – capsulated for progress.

Fogged, we move slowly, making our way through the darkened room, feeling for the quilted edge of the bed, then the rounded corner of the night stand, then the closed book to retire our glasses, and finally the pillow – careful not to wake the one already sleeping.

Looking into the fog beyond the birds – anticipating their disappearance became a contest – a race against time. How much longer would I see them? Would they fade or suddenly be gone? Were they flying to reach the fog, exhausted by its combined retreat and pursuit?  Flight navigated by instinct – an inner compass directing.

The birds were a moment. The kind of picture bought, framed, and hung on the wall. A reminder of a place visited. A view breathing life into a windowless wall. The miracle of flight captured, conjuring a dream waiting to be chased while fading with the passing of each day; until, predictably and suddenly – it vanishes from possibility. The rain check never honored. The ring not promised. The “I’m sorry” unsaid. The forgiveness withheld. The chance never taken – too uncertain to leap, no wings for flight. So much to reach for – until you can’t.

Looking down at my watch, I realized I had overstayed. The fog had revealed so much. I had lost track of time. I turned to leave, climbed into my truck, and disappeared into the fog from which I had come. Did the birds notice? Had we been watching each other? 

As I drove away from the water, the fog lifted. I wondered if the birds had been traveling home, collecting family along the way. The end of another busy day. Looking forward to being home, nested and safe for sleep – protected from the outside world, reaching for that peaceful moment when your body feels heavy, the day fades, and tomorrow feels too distant to see – leaving you anchored for dreaming.

The present is not temporal – it is not a place we stop at along the way. It is not a break from living.  The present is where we move forward without being held by the past or directed by the future. Compassed by dreams, we fly between it all, the past beneath and the future overhead.  

Tomorrow never comes. Yesterday is gone. What matters most, what gives us the courage for flight, is the company we keep.

Storm clouds linger, playing hide and seek with the sun. The ocean rests, rolling and dimpled by an offshore breeze.

I have returned to the scene of the storm, the spot where I leaned weight into wind with the rain pelting my glasses. The spot where my imagination conjured a drowning man fallen overboard, boots filled and sinking to the bottom. Lost at sea, so close to home. It was a day when everything spiraled out from the center: wind, waves, and rain exploding like the universe born from a single big bang. A center that could no longer hold.

I walk from the parking lot with my spiral notebook and pen to jot down the kind of details my memory does not capture – the kind that draw a reader’s attention: the green and yellow bird laying dead on its side at the head of the trail, its feet curled tight, still clutching an invisible branch.

I make my way back to the fading path, step over the fallen tree and bend under the arching limb. This time when I reach the spot where the path gives way to open air, I notice another fallen tree grown into the ground, wrapped in vines adorned with red and yellow leaves: a place to sit.

Today the center is empty, gravity pulls from all directions, sky and ocean are still, a canvas waiting patiently. Explosion turned implosion. Warning reframed to invitation. Pushing flipped to pulling.  

I notice the fire burned scrub pine, its charred branches flat against the gray-blue sky. The beach below pocked with the footsteps of holiday weekend visitors now packed back into their cars heading across the bridge to wherever they call home.

A trail of rocks dragged up by the undertow snakes along the tide line. Clouds fill the middle of the sky with baby blue below and deep blue above.

Ankle high waves lap. Seals play, their slick black bodies undulating. The colliding turmoil gone, spun out to sea, the storm’s energy exhausted. 

A single boat makes its way South, too far to see clearly, but the white water breaking against the bow creates the illusion of a puffed cloud skimming the surface. A fisherman headed home? A local out for one more warm day on the ocean? Friends stretching the long weekend. Too far away to see. No matter, the illusion of a cloud skimming is more wonderful than the twisted and focused picture an intrusive lens would reveal. Truth is more than fact, deeper than detail, often beneath the surface, or behind the curtain, or hiding quietly at the back of the room hoping to be discovered.

The open ocean feels endless spilling over the horizon. More than anything it is quiet. The absence of the howling wind has left the beach feeling empty – like a single chair waiting and lit by the warm sun paned glass of an open window. 

The sun breaks through, stretching the shadow of the cliffs to the water’s edge. A darkened reflection of the stunted woods rooted in the cliff. So much changes with light. The soft-edged comfort of a shadowed world silhouetted, offering relief from light too bright, too direct, too revealing. 

A stranger enters the empty stage below, a camera slung over one shoulder, the extended lens tilting downward, a scope for shooting and capturing subjects from too far away to really understand. His hiking boots dig against the sand leaving deep rounded prints. He wears the clothes of someone who lives where the streets are sidewalked and lights dim the stars. He stops and turns to look at the ocean, camera hanging, then reaches for his pocket and presses a cell phone to his ear. 

I wonder who might be on the other end. What caller is important enough to interrupt everything. Whose call does he always answer?  Perhaps a partner inside somewhere reaching out with a reminder of something needed at the store, or just checking in, or maybe asking when he expects to return to wherever it is they live together. 

Connected to the voice at the other end, I can see his eyes look away from the ocean. His camera with its snapped images of the day waiting to be shared. Flat colored renderings of things, the spaces, the emptiness, the quiet invitation to sit – impossible to capture. The nothing resting before us defies framing.

So much quiet. Nothing moves across the stretched and frameless canvas of water, sand, and sky. No sound to hear; there is quiet for listening. No words to say; there is time to wonder. No thing to see; there is space to look. Everything resting and still in the wake of the storm, there is room to breathe. 

If only I could somehow capture this moment, secure it for another time, place it on a shelf somewhere within reach. Why is it that in turmoil we cannot lean in, inhabit the quiet center? How is it that our mind, the lens we use to interpret, cannot be adjusted to see beyond our immediate circumstances, to change the picture, alter the reality, capture what we need, and leave the rest outside our frame of reference?

I put down my pen, close my notebook and feel the sun at my back, the softened trunk of the fallen tree beneath me, and my feet rooting at the edge. What stretches before me is beyond anything I could imagine, beyond words, beyond pictures. Somehow the storm has left a space in its wake, a gap between things that pulls at me like a window lifted, welcoming fresh air into a room left closed for too long.

I stand and walk back up the path. Closed notebook and pocketed pen, I too, become part of the quiet. Enveloped by thoughts of a life shared with the one whose call I always answer.

There is great comfort in the rain. Hood up. Hands buried. Cocooned and drifting – puddles rise and serpentine the way.

With time to spend, you take the fading path. Stepping over fallen tree and bending under arching limb, you trod abandoned ground.

Wind and salt diminish growth, you tower among the stunted trees. At end, where path gives way to open air, you lean, weight against wind, exposed on edge.

They break everywhere: the waves below. Barrelling, closing, ebbing, swirling, cresting, falling, churning with sand and foam. The beach wiped clean by undertow – no trespassing today.

A slick black head appears. Her nose pointed windward, then diving, til she bobs again. Is that play or something more? 

Wind everywhere – the only sound to reach your perch. You waver, eyes squinting, looking out as far as you can see. Feet rooted, lenses speckled, overseeing chaos.

Imagine falling overboard. Boots filling. Mind spinning. Gravity pulling. Pitched by waves you cannot see. You reach, and find nothing.

Water floods lungs. Ocean smashes in all directions. Cold with no concern. You let go – surrender – sinking breathless and heavy. 

Lost at sea so close to home.

Turning away, wind at your back, you return to stunted woods. Wind quiets. Lighthouse signals: beacon built for rescue. 

You step back over fallen tree, bend out from under nested pines, and feel the rain.

Standing on the sand, ankle deep in September water, the sky stretches cloudless from naked dunes to oceaned horizon. A boundlessly blue dome reflected in tidal pools – reminder of the vastness of space. Specs on specs of dust, our lives blink on and off – fireflies against the black expanse of time. 

Simultaneously, our living is everything and nothing: each moment a miracle born from impossible circumstances; amounting in the end to nothing but dust. Dark illuminating light. Light extinguishing dark. Each of us, a unique crack of lightning, a moment of full illumination eventually absorbed into the collective rumbling of human history. 

September holds so much at once: setting expectations, imagining perfections, starting again. It is the month when so many commit to being and doing better. Children reunite with friends. Yellow buses roll from stop to stop. The morning rush returns. 

Then there is the first night of cool dry air. Blankets pulled from chests and drawn over heads with windows still open – the practice of summer nights.

Beach towns empty, streets unclog, parking fees no longer apply, and dogs run free along breaking waves. 

The water is the warmest of the year with the sun hot, a yellow orb fastened to dry blue skies. September swims: a gift for those who make the oceanside their home. 

The final stacking of wood, the trimming of plants, the moving of things indoors. Summer colors (red, white, and blue) replaced by the oranges, yellows, and rustic reds of autumn. 

Gardens yield their final fruits. Apples and pumpkins grow heavy enough to claim.

Tee-shirts thicken to sweatshirts. Hats become knit. Pants grow long. Sandals morph to shoes. 

All of this change, this work of the new season, this resetting that we call September is important and inconsequential. We must take ourselves and our work seriously in order to push through the challenges, improve ourselves, grow, produce exceptional work, make art that matters, and demonstrate the impact of our living. Conflictingly, lifting our heads to take in the larger world – to wonder at the sky – is the only way to keep from being swallowed by myopic efforts buried by diminishing returns. We must ignore quantitative accolades, so we might feel the freedom to accomplish rewards defying explanation and surpassing measured perfection. We cannot be held back by the possibility of failure if engagement is the goal.

Somehow our very best comes forth when we let go of expectations, when we step back from the record keeping, the measuring, and the judging. When we accept how little what we are doing matters, then continue with our efforts inspired by visions of greatness. Our most extraordinary performances are born from the innocence of play, the carefree focus of simple immersion in the thing being done, the humility of enjoying the moment for the moment.

Joy lifts the weight that causes us to hesitate, to falter, to over-try. Joy lets in the light, manifesting in the smile that breaks through the strain of effort. There is a letting go, a surrendering to the moment that happens when we do things for the joy of doing them. When we read for the story – not to reach the end. 

The relaxed expression of the first to cross the finish line is our proof: having let go of the struggle and allowed legs and arms to work together fueled by lungs and heart embracing the feeling of running – no thought of time or distance or competition – just the pleasure of movement. The irony of not running to win and winning by running.

Only when we embrace the paradox of the miraculous nature of our existence and the insignificance of our actions are we set free to pursue, unfettered, the feeling of a thing being done well: the bed made, the word chosen, the pancake flipped, the shirt folded, the window cleaned, the note hit. Oblivious to expectations, judgments, and critiques: we forget to make mistakes. We become the thing we are doing. We become our unconditional best.

When we reach beyond expectations to grasp the essence of the thing being done, then we open ourselves for singular moments umbrellad beneath clear blue September skies when everything – for a second – feels perfect.

You have to pay attention when you walk barefoot. Naked, our feet feel their own way: firm ground for the heel, open space for the arch, smooth pad for the toes. Left . . . right . . left . . right . . . eyes and feet engaged in a serpentining dialogue.

Intentional steps calm, give attention to the breath, unhinge the stride, and lift the stress of busyness, allowing things to be remembered and forgotten, imagined and released until we are – present.

Writing rewards with focused attention. Puzzling words together unifies fragmentation, harmonizes cacophony, and clarifies uncertainty.

It often begins with nothing: a journey down an empty rabbit hole. Then, as words follow words, ideas form, questions arise, answers emerge, then – if you are patient – the familiar turned over, becomes strange, new, revelatory. Hand and brain engaged in a conversation like bared foot and searching eyes serpentining with wonder.

I prefer to begin with pen on paper. The smooth role of the ball point staining the page in a blend of print and script, crossing t’s and dotting i’s; punctuation establishing rhythm. Once inked, the piece is typed, computerized and ready for revision. But even then I find I need the printed page, the feel of the paper, the pen marking this, crossing out that, making arrows to direct something somewhere else, my cryptic number system signaling where newly scribbled ideas might go. Then back to typing, then print, then markup, and repeat – all the time reading out loud, listening for the flow, wondering what the words are trying to understand. Clay on the wheel turned to an empty bowl, needing to be read for completion, my spaces filled by a reader’s living.

Finally there is the publishing – the sending of the piece out into the world to be read – or not. Letting go of it all: the idea, the worry, the pain, the suffering, the joy, the confusion, the certainty, all of it purged – expelled like a deep breath released to make room for the next. Free of the work, I can pay attention again – direct my mind to new territory – wait for a word, a sentence, a phrase – to emerge from something observed – a new wondering. Back down the rabbit hole I go.

Too often we find ourselves standing feet-fixed at the edge – in the impact zone. No time to wonder through things – to find our way to the other side. To name the deck of cards and in so doing return renewed – more certain of who we really are. 

Too often we are buried by the rush of the next thing. Too tired to break free, we sink into that place where life smacks at you again and again. Wave upon wave into the quicksand of the undertow. Knocking us forward, pulling us back, blunting our feet against the rocks scrambling on their return to the bottom. 

Three steps back and you stand safe on dry sand – reduced to a distracted member of the audience. A bystander in your own life. For those able to take three steps forward – three steps deeper into the trouble – to the place where the water is overhead, the smacking turns to lifting, the pulling to cradling, and where the bruising rocks cling to the bottom while your feet float weightless with the rise and fall of each wave.

There in the deeper water when the rogue wave comes – they are inevitable – if you dive deep, submerge yourself, then you will be buoyed on the other side. Life deeply examined – confronted with authenticity, is not simple or pleasant or happy, but it does slow for understanding – for the peace of mind that comes from having stepped into confrontation, for piecing things back together. 

Fully exposed, our thinking goes quiet. Our body floats weightless.  Grasses dance with wind. Clouds pass overhead. The world spins. Then we dive below the surface, submerged and uncertain where we end and everything begins. Swallowed, we find ourselves aware of the breath – the miracle: floating on this planet, at this time, spinning through the universe – our thoughts reduced to the beauty of a single empty moment filled.

Washing in the undertow of the rising tide, shining with salted water, and smoothed by colliding, beach rocks beckon examination. 

Each celebrates its color, shape, and distinguishing imperfections. An idiosyncratic sampling of the planet fragmented to rocks, smoothed to stones, rounded to pebbles, reduced to sand, ground to dust, and – finally –  blown to thin air.

Cold to the touch, they shimmer when held – sea water draining through fingers turning them this way and that, feeling the smoothed edges, the weight of treasure found. An artifact to be taken home.

But when they do find their way inland whether in buckets, pockets or by hand; something changes. No longer tumbled against their kind, now separated from their original work of erosion, they are at risk. 

Some reimagine themselves to do the work of memory: sitting comfortably on a silver tray atop a wooden bureau, a morning reminder of the summer vacation faded by the changing season. Some are carried for comfort, safely nestled into pockets and at the ready for a reaching hand. Some find themselves reunited with others in gardens edged by sand and peppered with shells.  It is the ones cast aside, forgotten in buckets, that lose their luster coated with the dust of apathy – dislodged from their work they begin to vanish. Once part of the great effort of erosion – the shaping of our planet – now removed by myopic fingers and left carelessly behind – wondering: 

Why?

Where we live matters. Finding a home that releases talent and demands creativity opens possibilities for directed flight grounded by intent – work that matters. Over time our world becomes storied by experiences. The tree where our children built a fort – now grown over. The house on the hill where our grandmother took us to visit with her friend. The beach where we first noticed the endless stretching of the horizon. The street sign now leaning where a friend – now gone – once lived. Belonging does something for us. Lets our light shine, grounds us to lean in with confidence, to feel safely rooted. Things must dig in deep to survive the reckless trampling of strangers.

Unable to move, beach rocks work to reshape the landscape by giving themselves to the rising and falling tides. Unable to grow, they change through their resistance to water and wind. Unable to speak, they give voice to the final gasp of each wave’s retreating undertow.  Unable to feel, they offer themselves to be held dripping with color and compressed by weight that when clasped feels solid – like holding a piece of everything that has ever been. 

We too must find our way. Regardless of circumstances and unhindered by what we cannot control – we must lean into the present, discover work that needs doing – uncover the reason we have arrived in a certain place at a certain time. 

Stop wondering why – no answer will matter. We must move through the resistance; grow under the weight; speak into the silence; feel everything deeply conflicted: good against bad, wonder inside horror, joy coupled with sadness.

Each morning the beach offers a new chapter written in isolation under a night sky lit by the reflected light of a barren moon. For those of us fortunate enough to live alongside her, the waves are a reminder of the need to keep working – aware that each day is an opportunity to try again – even after we have been left behind.

Layered clouds sag with the weight of the storm passing out to sea. The water chops. White caps collide without rhyme or reason. Thin patches of blue rinse through gray sky. The air has cooled. The season is changing.

Winds bend beach grass greened from yesterday’s rain – anchoring shifting sands to dunes swallowing barrier fences – foolish sticks wrapped with wire to slow erosion. The same that sank Georges Bank, and someday will cover everything like Atlantis.

But for now, for our lifetime, and that of our children and their children – the crooked arm of Cape Cod’s shifting sands is our refuge – our home flexing beyond the mantle of the mainland. Benched atop the dunes of Nauset, I sit wondering at the horizon: a crack of clearing light squeezed between green-pitched water and gray-swirled sky.

Strangers come and go while I sit, notebook open, pen scratching, toes dug into warm sand, and my friend waiting patiently, her red collar still damp from yesterday’s walk. I watch the staggered parade connected by a common destination and distinguished by their reasons. The lone walker. The binocular holder. The reader. The side by side couple. The surf rod carrier.

A wooden guard stand floats magically above the beach grass, gliding its way toward the safety of the parking lot where it will sit with the others to wait for summer. As the stand approaches the break in the dunes, a yellow backhoe with its forklift rolling on large tires deflated for the sand is revealed. One task on today’s list for the driver – a symbolic sighting for witnessing strangers: the seasonal changing of the guard.

On the sister bench across the boardwalk a stranger sits hooded with an open book – reading.

Another stranger and his dog approach from the parking lot. The beach is open again for our best friends. He says good morning from the end of the leash, his friend straining toward the water.

A third just above the tide line opens her pink blanket to the wind and lets it settle flat. Then she sits facing the water, her back to the world, her legs folded in, her arms resting with hands turned open to the sky. She is still and nearly invisible against the pitching ocean and clouded horizon. Breathe in. Breathe out. The waves tumbling onto the sand, their skyward reach collapsed by gravity.

We are here together, bouncing off of each other like the waves pitching in the shifting winds. Wandering beyond the reach of the rush, the responsibilities, the schedules, the lists, the phone calls, the emails, the texts.  

We have benched ourselves. Some as a reward for decades of work. Some by good fortune, their lives evolving to a place where they are free to come and go in life as they please. Some on a break from their twisting journey. Some as part of their routine. Each of us drawn to the wave-washed sideline for our own reasons: to breathe, to see horizon, to smell salt, to hear waves, to feel wind, to remember, to imagine . . .  to be. 

For all of us the beach calls with its emptiness. Not the carnival call of summer. Not the stormy call of winter. A quieter gesture – like a friend waving to us through the crowd, pointing to a seat saved. An invitation to fill empty space with companionship – a gift for having made the effort to show up.

I close my notebook, slip my pen into my pocket, and nudge my friend – it is time. We have time this morning – inspired by our strangers, I feel permission to wander. Who knows when we will have another open morning when everything that must be done can wait. 

I take myself off the bench. The absence of expecting voices, the uncertainty of what is next, the lack of any clear path, and the wide open space before me raises questions I have forgotten to ask – lost in work for so many years. What do you love? What have you learned to do well? What deepens your sleep? Why are you here, now, in this place? Who needs you? Why? What happens if we break from the prescribed – if we live without consideration for the scorekeepers?

I walk with my friend down onto the sand and reach into my pocket. She sits, staring up. I throw her favorite ball. She runs – her paws digging deep, her legs galloping til she overruns the ball, circles, grabs, then lifts it to me – again, please throw it again. 

I smile, reach down, grab the ball, and throw. 

I know there will be days when life will keep us from the beach. Even today is filled with things we must do. But for now, I am happy to throw and walk with my friend, hoping we will find a way to make it back here tomorrow – so I can throw her ball again and again. 

I still wear a watch, but on Sundays I try to leave it on the nightstand,  hoping my eyes will open before the sun warms the windows of our bedroom and the robins begin their conversation. 

I love the Sundays with no hockey rushing us to the rink, no soccer taking us over the bridge, no work tethering us to the computer, and no social invitations piling us into the car. An empty day: nothing to do and no place to go.

Free to do our own thing, we orbit each other bubbled by the gravity of our interests. The quiet sound of reading, the jingle of the dog tags as someone clicks on Stella’s collar for a neighborhood walk, the bowing and plucking of the double bass played from the back room, the sound of turning magazine pages, the wind through the chimes on the deck.

We circle around our kitchen table for family brunch. Everything timed to be ready together. Food overwhelming plates. Glasses filled with colored juices, pancakes stacked, eggs scrambled with vegetables, and the rare smell of bacon in the oven. The fixings for the bagels, sliced and toasted. Stella, stationed and drooling at the ready.

The soundtrack is jazz: music designed for improvisation. Miles Davis’s haunting horn. Ella Fitzgerald’s perfect pitch, and Duke Ellington’s mesmerizing compositions. Music that cradles you through the day. Elegant structures with space for the unfettered joy of riffing.

Someone eventually suggests a walk. The long one down to the water, along the marsh, through the woods and back up the road. I always fall behind with my short steps – straining to listen to their conversation. I find myself wanting to keep up and enjoying the witness-perspective of my distance at the same time.

Two by two, like Noah’s friends, we walk down the road, single-filing for passing cars. We stop with each leash-collared dog, my wife asking permission of the owner, then leaning down to say hi, hand scratching just behind the ears. She loves dogs – good thing they come attached to people or we would almost certainly bring them all home.

After the walk, we disperse again into our circling orbits. Puttering here and there. Fixing the thing broken for months, updating the grocery list, gathering kindling for the night’s fire, battling a virtual screen-framed foe, looking for Stella’s ball rolled again under some heavy piece of furniture, sitting at the piano playing a song from memory, stretching warm clean sheets across our beds – being together outside of time.

Our late breakfast stretches us to an early dinner. We sit outside, each in our own chair, balancing a plate or bowl. The music changes – James Taylor, Fleetwood Mac, Simon and Garfunkel – story tellers with lyrics echoing our own history. Ancient ritual, oral tradition: circle around the fire to share stories told in the soft focus of memory. 

Then, because it is summer, the evening is allowed to fade without ceremony, without the check of homework, without coordinating the schedule for the week. Simple sand draining without notice, piling to be flipped for the new day.

At the end, our house feels quiet – anchored. Stella has been out for the last time to do her business before being the first to climb the stairs for bed. My wife has finished talking with her mother on the phone. I have put down my book and marked the page before the next chapter. Our twins have brushed their teeth and closed the door of their bedroom. I push the front and back doors closed until their latches click, check the windows, clean a milk-laced glass left in the sink, turn off the living room light, and climb the stairs using the railing. 

I know time and the systems it organizes make modern life possible. I love the buzz of a life filled with change and the roller coaster of emotions we feel with each new experience. I realize having nothing you need to do and nowhere you need to be is not sustainable.  But at the end of a rare empty Sunday, I always find myself hoping for the next morning when I can leave my watch on the bedside table.

Fog hangs thick and cold. Warm sands chill. Rain drizzles. Wind blows the water cold. Thunder rumbles. Lightning flashes. Windshield wipers swiping, defroster blowing, day-lights on:  I have the road to myself.

The beach parking lot looks more like mid November than mid August. The attendant booth is closed, door shut, the tide and water temperature board unchanged from yesterday. I coast into my favorite spot at the foot of the blue-mat boardwalk: rolled out for summer people with their beach wagons, heavy shoulder bags, folded chairs, and wheeled coolers.

The ocean rumbles in the fog. I think of the ships wrecked against the shifting sandbars before the lighthouses were built, the lives lost to the sea, the lives saved by the coast guard risking themselves for strangers. The hubris of boats bobbing over deep waters. A storm’s reminder of our weakness, our ignorant efforts to control a planet insistent upon change.

Down at the tide line, the white water now in view, the ocean feels good across my feet hardened from months of walking barefoot. The rocks that poked and cut in June are smoothed.

Ankle deep, I listen and count between the thunders. A summer storm is moving across our elbowed landscape – last stop before the freedom of the open ocean. I picture the traffic in town – cars lined behind blinking left turn signals. I hear shopping carts clattering through the grocery store – pushed by strangers straining to read the aisle signs in search of the next thing on their list. I imagine families circled up around mini golf links – their tiny colored pencils keeping the score. 

I take shelter in the dunes. Hood up, arms hugged, I nestle into the sand, close my eyes, and listen. Another rumble in the distance. I begin counting again. Waves break, reach for the tide line, and retreat. The air is damp, the sky is dark, and the guard stands are empty. An abandoned yellow shovel, a single flip flop, and the windblown ruins of a once proud sandcastle – reminders that  today marks the heart of the summer season. 

The first drops are light, the next are heavy, then thunder opens the skies and the rain pours down, bouncing off of my jacket, falling over the brim of my hat, and sinking silently into the sand. The curtain of fog begins to lift. I see the dark head of a seal bobbing with the waves. Then she is gone, vanished beneath the rain-dropped ocean. Light flashes, thunder cracks, and I begin counting again.

This time my count reaches twenty-three. The storm is leaving. Tomorrow there will be blue sky, bright sun, and warm water. But now the sky is dark, the sun is dull, and the water is cold: what a beautiful day. 

Sunlight refracted into colors through microscopic water droplets directed us off the main road. 

One minute we were driving home to shower, make dinner, and get to bed on time, and then . . . we were not. 

A simple quarter turn left and we headed for the Coast Guard Life Saving Station. The one built nearly a century ago to save lives, now restored for research, a reminder of how times have changed: the pragmatic saving of a single drowning life replaced by theoretical efforts to save a poisoned planet.

We were not the only ones drawn from our path by the prismed light. Others with pointed cameras and raised phones had pulled off to capture the rainbow.

We parked and walked to the bench where I used to sit eating lunch and looking across the marshy inlet toward our distant neighborhood. An eagle could have seen the bench across the way at the end of the road where we run, but our vision falls short- limiting us to imagine what might be out there – waiting for us.

Standing between my twins, grown impossibly tall, we studied the landscape. There was nothing to say, the rainbow filled our quiet.

The showers, dinner, and sleep would have to wait while we stood at the edge of the postcard scene: slanted light, greened grass, rainbowed stripes, and whitecapped ocean.

I hoped I would remember the moment soft focused by time like I remember the afternoon they first rode their bikes training-wheel-free on the dirt road behind our house; like I remember the early fall evening after soccer practice when we lied down in the grass and watched the pink clouds shape-change, and like I remember the first morning we stood close waiting at the end of our street for the school bus.