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Kim – The thing about this body is…
It’s tired. exhausted. depleted.
I hit fifty this year, not that I feel fifty all the time. In my head, I feel the same as I always have, except for the tired part.
My ten-year-old son is an energetic child. I mean, he leaps and hangs from every door, hinge or handle. Runs and jumps, and no matter how much gym equipment we set up outside, he thrives on pushing the envelope and making me crazy with worry. He is the reason I have begun to understand why God wants us to have children in our twenties. My boy beats to his own drum, and this, this I understand, and so I am reminded that he was really meant to be with me. He is adorable, interesting, funny, and charming, He’s also independent, stubborn, and angry. He loves nature, and frogs, toads, and insects, cats, fish and whatever. He saves bugs and sets them free. He’s particularly fond of young children, and he can be so lovable that you could just squeeze him into tomorrow. His vocabulary is that of one much older, his brain runs a mile a minute, but a boy like my son, with “issues,” well, there isn’t much tolerance in this tight-ass society. When did the world become so unforgiving? I am tired of fighting. Fighting with the schools, and the bean-counters, with my husband, and my son, because we are all weary and bruised. He’s a great kid. I just wish he could show it every day, show the world what those of us blessed to know this boy have witnessed in him.
He used to be such a happy child. Lively, yes. Mischievous, sure. Loud, absolutely. But happy. Silly. Hysterical. And then the world wove itself into our little family. And so, he’s pissed and now everyone is this house is angry.
We live next to a psychotic neighbor, who has tortured us for eight years with his monotone, whinny complaints, and unbending, self-serving nonsense. Yesterday, he approaches my door grasping a snippet of his precious, root-bound grass – barely the size of a tennis ball. My son, he explained, ripped it from his property and threw it at him as he drove by. My son has been “frightening” his family by shooting them with his fingers. I am serious. His fingers – you know, the index finger is the gun barrel as well as the trigger, but, this guy asks me, “what will he do when he is fifteen?” I try to explain to this lunatic, in as clear a manner I can muster, that the boy is ten. He is angry because this man gave me a hard time in front of the boy about him riding his bike on the private road, of which we have legal rights and pay to maintain, and because the husband mowed a few inches of his lawn, and whatever else he could piss about. I tried to tell him that the boy cannot get over it, and I suggest that we are the adults and he is the ten-year-old-boy, and could we not just ignore this? Even though I yell at my son an a daily basis, to ignore this neighbor, to try and get over it, to stay off his lawn, to not throw a sticks or rocks or grass or anything, to not touch his fence that was erected to prevent us from mowing a few inches of his grass. To not be a bully like this man. Even though I love this home, I have wanted to move for five years, and now we may do so, because, my husband was recently diagnosed with MS and we live on a huge hill, with a challenging yard and driveway, and it’s too much. Everything is too much.
As I was approaching my fortieth year, I experienced the worst two years of my life and the best moment of my life. My brother died in a horrific accident, my best friend committed suicide, my sweet grandmother slipped away, and my father dropped dead in front of me. But my son came into our life, and it was a miracle because it looked as though he would never come, and when Grandma died and less than a month later we got the call, we knew that God and Grandma sent this baby to us.
I sometimes think, is it too much to ask for a bit of peace? To enjoy my son? To not have your brain pummeled with shit until you feel like life is pelting you at every turn, and you start to duck even when nothing is even coming?
But the thing about this body is that it endures. I have lived through migraines and stomach woes, two shoulder surgeries and a barrel full of anxiety, and I sometimes feel ninety, but, I still feel nine when my son points to a beautiful swarm of dragonflies, or a lovely butterfly, and when he reminds me to slow down and appreciate what is real.
The thing about this body is…Parts. I see parts, not the whole. I see aging parts, parts for which I cannot get replacements. I see a body I can’t trade in for a newer model.
My upper arms—dripping white pillows, creamy and thick—hang from too-narrow shoulders. Naked, I could wear shoulder pads. Sometimes I stand in front of a mirror and jiggle my upper arms. Wings of fat slap and flap. With just a little aerodynamic lift, I could take off.
I cannot take fat off. I cannot ask it to move. It prefers under my chin, my full apple belly (I want to be a pear– but no, I have to be the dreaded apple). It puffs, Pillsbury Doughboy-like, around me, yet my butt is as flat as a piece of cardboard and there is not a shred of fat on the back of my hands, making them practically see-through. The bones, veins, and ligaments all show through translucent skin, a veritable anatomy lesson at the end of my arms.
I hoist up the excess skin above the upper eye that gives us our familial “Sad cow look,” as my sister calls it. I pull taut the dark, droopy circles under my eyes and pinch a finger on either side of my lower cheeks to tighten my marionette lines. Up come the sagging jowls. I purse my thin lips into a pout and stick my chin forward and up so that the light hits me “just so.”
I don’t like my joints, and there are parts of my body, like the C4-C5 vertebrae or the piriformis muscle, that I never even knew I had and now I don’t like. We had hardly gotten to know each other when I hated them. I worry about synapses in my brain and amyloid plaques building up. I worry about my DNA. It’s so maddeningly, mitochondriacally small but it’s everywhere. It’s the stuff nightmares are made of. I think about my DNA, but not with wonder about my amazing genetic ancestry. I worry about broken strands and “indications.”
I don’t like my test results. I used to do well in tests in school. Now my body parts are subjected to tests I can’t cram for, ones where I don’t get good grades. How could I get a good grade in “C-reactive protein”? There WAS no “C-reactive protein” when I was in school.
Here’s something else bizarre: Why does everything go wrong with the parts of my body that have two “e’s” in them: Eyes, teeth, knees, feet? They all have problems, and they all have two “e’s.” Have doctors studied this correlation?
And what about those tests for dementia where they ask you the day of the week, the day of the month, and the year? I, who wrote 2004 on a check last week? I, who think today was yesterday, and who only knows the day of the month by the birthdays I’ve missed? Do I have to worry about THAT part of my body… the part that is writing this? Isn’t that dishearteningly recursive, to write about this body using one of the failing parts?
Hi Everyone,
Per Nancy, the next new topic is ”Here is the conversation we never had.”
We’ll start posting them in August and let July wind up on the current topic.
Cis, sea glass girl
The width of my shoulders will never decrease. My arms will never be attractive sticks with sexily bony shoulders sticking out of a halter dress and covered lightly by a cotton pashmina on a way to a summer wedding. Ten years of gymnastics spanning several formative growth spurts saw to that. Being the school chin-up champ only paid when I was still in school. Hard sinew has dissolved, leaving flaccid flesh in the space that once specially stretched to contain the bulk. Maybe another awe-struck Japanese flight attendant will one day ask if I am a swimmer, maybe I’ll laugh again and try to forget about it. My bones and muscles have decided once and for all on this configuration. I am not slight. Slight is not in the cards for me.
And so my head, with all its hair pulled back, will forever resemble a key lime atop a watermelon. Why not just let the mane flow free then? Grow it long to cover the broad shoulders and sausage arms? Turns out that this body responds to stress in a most unique fashion – it doesn’t lose its appetite or temper; it doesn’t sleep for days. No, when there’s chaos in my head, sensitive strands of hair get upset and abandon ship. Gaping bald spots the size and shape of drinking glass bottoms adorn this noggin and can only be concealed by a tactical hairdo – the small head, big shoulders ‘do. Murphy’s law saw to that.
This body of mine can twist into the most delightful shapes – pretzels and bridges and knots. Joints overextending, toes as long as fingers and fingers like Gollum’s. The nails at the end of those fingers will never have graceful oval-shaped tips tapping on typing keys, hardened and immune to the very air which seems to corrode the ones I’ve been given: fragile, flexible, their layers peeling apart like filo dough. This body has big ol’ knockers that are already hanging low despite being only 30 years old and childless.
This body has no origin of which I know. As a child, I used to believe that adopted babies simply arrived in the hospital nursery via a chute from heaven, landing every now and again in a special basinet set up carefully beneath it – there just wasn’t a need for us to have passed through a human to come to be on this planet. In a way I still am connected to that belief. With no desire or easy way to locate the people who saw to it that my shoe size would be disproportionate to my height, that my left eyelid would droop or that I’d be able to eat more than a horse who has just sprinted clear across the state of Wyoming, I am lured, comforted, back into the magical thought that I came right from the sky, directly from the great beyond, and this body of mine – these features – mirror noone’s.
Barb – The Thing About This Body Is…
The thing about this body is that it doesn’t feel like a body at all.
It’s more of an apartment building with an active tenant downstairs.
There seems to be a combination of soccer, Irish step dancing, and
Tang Soo Do going on down there, frequently when I’m trying to go
to sleep. I remember I was an “innie” a month or two ago. I even
had abs in my thirties. The “occupant” is also making push ups more
iinteresting since I can’t tighten my abs. If I get any rounder, I’ll have
to dig a hole in the floor. I feel a lot like a “weeble” with legs.
Sometimes, the “tenant” feels like an angry old person banging a
broomstick against the ceiling. Is she mooning everybody through
my clothes? It would help me to remember this the next time I talk
to my boss.
There are plenty of other changes I’ve noticed. (So many complaints,
so little time.) I miss having energy. At over six months pregnant,
I am frequently bringing home a baby bumble bee just trying to go to the store
(when I’m not in the powder room). This body also changes quickly,
or maybe I’m just slow on the uptake. I’m frequently in need of pants.
Last week I was fine, or at least ok, and this week it’s ‘Merry Christmas!’
What’s with the belly? I don’t remember strapping on a watermelon.
‘Relax’, my friend said, ‘you’re supposed to look like this, there’s a baby
in there.’ This makes for a lot more of me to haul around than I’m used to.
The blessing is, I really haven’t gained as much weight as some do. I am
allegedly “carrying small” in the sense that I am showing, but only to my friends,
unless I’m wearing maternity clothes. The problem is, I’m having
a hard time seeing it. That’s the problem with eating disorders, you can
gain the weight back but the crap colored glasses never come off. I don’t
think I’ll ever be able to see myself objectively as others do. Forget liking
what I see. I frequently get the fun house mirror view, and not in a good
way.
I am still working at my job, in between doctor’s appointments. I haven’t
told anyone there we are pregnant. I find it baffling that no one has said a
word to me since I’ve gained 20 pounds over the last six months. Then
again, I frequently feel like I could show up in swim fins and a tutu and
no one would notice. There’s the equal likelihood that no one cares, my
office is not big on “warm fuzzies”.
I also miss having ankles. My mom grew up on a farm in Poland. One
day recently, I took my shoes off and I looked like the pigs feet in aspic
she used to make, without the vinegar. This does not look like a good
summer for sandals. I called the doctor’s office to ask where my ankles
went and they said “More fluids.” More fluids??!! I thought I was
peeing enough now! ‘Wasn’t I retaining water like the Hoover Damn,
hence the swelling?’, I asked. “Hormones”, they said. ‘O, Goody’,
I said.
This brings me to another issue I have with this body, the ‘scrambled brain
syndrome’ I keep running into. I was never what I considered ‘normal’ before.
I was however, able to eat lunch without wearing it, not lose items I put back
in the same place everyday, and I was able to have a conversation with my
spouse sans going from ok to furious or bawling nut job in 7.6 seconds.
The hormone fairy flipped open my cranium, put a stick in there
and really stirred things up. ( I hate that b**ch.) I wish it was
possible to send my husband a bouquet of beer to his office.
‘You’ve got two and a half months left to go’, my friend said,
‘better get him a keg.’ Thanks, love you too. We are decorating
the nursery with baby Looney Tunes. How fitting.
The Thing about My Body Is – Cissy
My body says, “Pay attention” and “Look away” using the same volume, tone and pitch. If I listen to one part I’m disobeying the other. We’re still making up from a fight neither one of us caused.
I have blamed my body for far too long for every accident, incident and assault. Staring with suspicion, the way one looks at a dead animal appearing on a sandy beach – with curiosity and disgust. Part of me wants to turn over the dead bird with the broken neck and featherless body and another part wants to walk away and pretend I didn’t see it. Instead, with a stick and a clam shell, I try to rearrange the body in a more respectful way. Part of me fears Mother Nature will rise up in some wild magic dance and the bird will fly into my face so I keep some distance.
My body didn’t intend to cause injury. Maybe it’s the stories. Ones I heard as a girl, then confirmed by medical reports where sentences read, “Mother states child fell thirty feet.” I don’t remember falling. I’ve heard various versions: I fell from the porch, the roof, the top of the garage. I was not yet two. Did I want to fly? Was I hurled in anger? Did I simply practice my crawling and slip? My mother says, when I fell, I didn’t cry and the silence and the run down the stairs to get me were among the longest and worst in her life. The repetitive dream of childhood was a free-fall in a black hole. I always awoke heart pounding before I hit the ground.
Another time, supposedly, I fell out of a moving car. I was sitting atop some suitcases by the window seat pre-baby seats, buckles or making sure doors holding in your children are closed. We rounded a corner with my first step-father at the wheel and I flew out of the car and onto the street. “You bounced,” is what I’ve been told, “Because you were so fat.” Everyone laughs still but I don’t. I wonder, Did my child self know what was coming? Was I a prisoner taking teaspoons to cement planning escape, trying to get away with no idea what destination I was heading for or was I just too young to make sure the door shut tight? I love scary rides at amusement parks but I do not like fast-moving automobiles. You will ALWAYS fine me in the driver’s seat.
In beds, with hands older and other than my own there was too much touch. I evaporated into bunk bed metal coils, purple and white sheets and the mattress. Expert I became at ignoring every cry from this body. I bruise easily and often, especially on my legs. It’s not anemia or a coagulation problem. It’s the way I walk into corners of beds and tables and use my body as a prop to lift furniture too heavy and sharp to hold on my thighs. My legs leave the marks of my disregard. On a beach, it seems everyone notices the bruises, calling my carelessness to my attention. I am the neglectful parent to my own skin who is the perpetrator of pain and punishment.
The cycle, broken on many levels has footholds in my psyche. The thing about this body is it has been begging for my loving caress, attentive appreciation and more timely responses.
I am old enough now, the mother of a real little girl, and not know the part of me saying “look away” was just frightened and the part saying “pay attention” is always telling the truth.
Terrie The Thing About This Body Is…
The thing about this body is, the whole right side is on a journey of its own. It’s been that way since I was born.
My right eye was seriously crossed at birth. I mean, it gazed inward towards my nose with incredible focus. My mother was careful to have me looking towards the left in all of my baby pictures, so you might not have even noticed it. However, there is one shot taken in Zaragosa, Spain when my father was stationed there. It has all three of the Queen girls – Debbie the five-year-old beauty, with her auburn ponytail and her Jackie Onassis face; Diane the baby with her white-blonde curls and wide, astonished gaze; and me – the middle child, with the unruly hair and the crazy eyes.
A famous surgeon operated in Spain and straightened the eye muscle. Unfortunately, he did such a great job that it then wandered to the right. After three more surgeries to correct his success, I still have an eye with an independent streak, prone to wander over to the right at will. Do you know how many times I have seen a confused look on someone’s face, followed by, “Are you talking to me?”
Then came the fever blisters. I was five when they first appeared, near my right ear, and everyone thought I had poison ivy. Later, the base doctors said it was staph infection, then allergies. Finally, someone realized it was herpes simplex, and for the rest of my life, usually at school picture time, I have been blessed with a glorious array of bumps and blisters, always on the right side of my face. “It follows a nerve pattern,” doctors told me, and I had to wonder what the hell that nerve was thinking. I had fever blisters for the prom, for the high school fashion show, for most big events in my life.
Next came sciatica. It started in college after a long road trip. “It’s like fire shooting down my right leg,” I told my grandmother, the irascible Ruby. “I’ll tell you what is is, darlin’,” she said in her direct fashion. “It’s that extra ten pounds you’ve put on from all of that pizza.” Ouch. That hurt. But even when I lost the ten pounds, the pain continued. Throughout the rest of my life, I have had sciatic nerve problems on the right side, sometimes to the point of agony. A massage therapist I went to back in ’98 told me that I was blocked on the right side, and I wondered where the block was – heart, head, or leg?
In 2004, while in Bali on vacation, I fell and broke my right kneecap. The whole thing popped right in half. I flew over 40 hours before I got back home to Louisiana and had surgery. So now I’ve got a right knee that I favor as well.
It was after this that I began to wonder what my right side was trying to tell me. Was my right eye trying to say, “Look inward!” until the surgeon turned it out? If so, is it now a constant reminder to ‘Look outside yourself, Terrie!”? Were the fever blisters a way of cautioning me? They come, after all, when I am tired, sick, stressed, or sunburned. Or maybe they are a way of making sure that I don’t become too fixated on the superficial. I mean, It’s hard to be too proud about your looks with a fiery line of oozing blisters scattered across your face. And the strangest thing happened when I broke my knee. The sciatica went away! I must have started walking or standing differently to accommodate my knee, and it took the pressure off of my sciatic nerve. Hmm…so the lesson in that is what? Something like, “Keep adjusting, honey, and things will work themselves out?”
Toni – The thing about my body is.
I had one of those preposterously bad days with my cellulite today. We were in the dressing room at Old Navy, which I imagine does not provide the friendlier “mood” lighting of say a Saks or Neiman’s, and there it was, boldly showing off, on my knees, my stomach, my inner arms even. I said to it, right there in the dressing room, “I hate you.” I said this by touching it and pulling it and trying to squint my eyes and contort my body so it didn’t seem so, well, ugly. “Don’t care,” my cellulite said back, by continuing to look exactly the same, like a bowl of lumpy oatmeal was pored just underneath my skin.
Now, my cellulite and I have had similar discussions in the past. On days when I’m feeling bad about myself, or don’t have enough to think about, or when I have to face the summer and a drawer full of shorts, and in dressing rooms, like today. It’s always sort of the same. I say, “You listen, I’m going to diet you out of town, exercise you off the face of the planet.” And it looks back at me, all bumpy, with it’s dark crevices and shadows and says boldly, in the most blasé tone, “Whatever.” Because it knows that “whatever” I do, I will have no luck evicting it. From all the information I have read about it, and I’m pretty sure I’ve read all the information there is to read about it, it’s right up there next to cockroaches – you just can’t kill it.
Now, I should tell you that I am not overweight. I’m 5’6 and between 119 and 121 and have weighed the same thing, give or take a few pounds since I was in high school. I was too skinny in 7th grade and had to take in my Landlubber hip huggers bell bottoms so they wouldn’t fall off of me. I have always worked out, always watched my weight, and my reward was a pretty decent body with toned cellulite-free skin, nice enough to allow me to wear skirts up to my vajayjay and the skimpiest shorts in the store. But then one day, there it was, on my lower thighs, right above the knee. I could only see it in certain light, so I pretended it wasn’t really there for a while. And then, it became unmistakable. Right there, above my knees, below my upper thighs was a band of dimpled skin. Most people get cellulite at the top of their thighs, which is common, but mine was in a completely unexpected place, making it even harder to cover up and impossible to ignore. I mean, is there a bathing suit on the market that can cover a strip of skin above your knees, while letting your thighs see the sun?
Once I realized it was really there and not a mirage, I began being really self-conscious and stopped wearing shorts all together. (a few years ago, the new super long, above your knee shorts came into style and my legs got a little fresh air, which they thanked me for.)
I am now 49, I work out with a trainer twice a week. I walk between two and three miles every other day. I eat pretty well. And I now have cellulite on my stomach, as well as the inside of my arms. It makes me feel ugly and like I need a good shower. It makes me feel like all that working out doesn’t really matter if I’m just going to look like someone who doesn’t take care of herself anyway. It makes me feel like less of a person.
Can you believe a little lumpy skin could do all that?
It’s crazy and that’s why the other day on the way home from the dressing room with the “cellulite” lighting, I had a talk with myself instead of my cellulite. “Listen,” I said to myself. You work out, you don’t eat like a gang of frat boys, you’re not fat, people tell you how good you look all the time, your husband of twenty years still wants to have sex with you every day, your kids love you, you have a lot of friends. You’re a really good person. So, what if you have some bumps under your skin? Forget it. There’s war, global warming, famine, gas prices, and Bill O’Reiley out there to worry about, shift your focus to things that matter and stop thinking about some way your skin looks. Live your life.”
And then, I told my cellulite. “Ok, you win, but let me just tell you one thing, it doesn’t matter what you look like, it matters what’s on the inside. And on the inside I don’t have cellulite.”
“Whatever,” my cellulite said again.
But this time, I just opened up the sun roof, hit the gas a little harder, turned up the radio and sang with the bad voice and lumpy cellulite my mamma gave me.
The Thing About My Body Is – Kathy
The thing about my body is, there is a lovely constellation of freckles on my arm that scatter in a charming way, like buttercups dotted in a field of grass ~ with one, like an accent at my delicate wristbone that leaves no need for a bracelet. The thing about my body is, it has really pretty toes ~ people have told me so ~ especially when painted with a french manicure and adorned with a diamond toe ring. The thing about my body is, it has this powerful, way of being in a room, if I ask it to be. A confident way of moving through space. You should see my legs do a kick boxing move. Or see the power of my quadriceps when I ask them, quivering, to do one more lowest to the ground squat. Beautiful.
And I have these hands that are to die for, with fingers that dance through the air as I speak, lightly accentuating each word. My hands are genius really. My fingertips, if they caress you, have a sensual knowing all their own. It’s all about the hands for my body. Oh, and of course, the eyes. A casual stranger told me recently, “You have flecks of orange in your eyes”.
The thing about my body is, if you ask me, I will not tell you these things. Instead of telling you of my secret admiration, I will tell you about my disgusting stomach that hangs over my jeans, or my ass gone flat from gravity, my neck crepey in a shirt. I will tell you how my body shames me in a mirror, and I will feed on its flaws like a hyena, mouth dripping with the blood of raw antelope meat.
I will not tell you of the few things I still hold dear. The few things carried over from childhood when my fingers making whorls on my stomach were comfort. When my knees, bending and flexing, were fascination. Those things I barely tell myself ~ except for now.
The thing about my body is, it’s a neglected, abused, but secretly adored friend. It’s the closeset thing to a “home” I’ll ever inhabit. I walk around in a mansion of miracles every day starting with the freckles and ending with the fingertips. But if you ask me, I’ll deny it.
The Thing About This Body – Terrie
The thing about this body of water is, it carries the heartbeat of my life.
I first saw the Gulf of Mexico when I was four years old. For the next few years, a great portion of my memories took place at Pensacola Beach. Summers were grape-flavored, with the shivery ice of the snow cone stand on the boardwalk. Memories were Coppertone-scented, the indisputable smell of summer. Family visits were history-centered, as we invariably took cousins and grandparents out to Ft Pickens, to imagine the flags of five different countries flying from its seawall.
My father was transferred when I was eight. After living in two other countries and two other states, he decided to retire from the Air Force. We headed back to Florida and called it home. I spent my high school years a little further down the beach at the Cross, a memorial structure perched high on a sand dune, where the teenagers met. I wore my first bikini, an orange number covered with creamy lace. I drove my first car, a 1965 push-button Valiant. I played my first game of Chicken in the foamy waves, my sisters and I perched on the shoulders of sailors from the navy base. I listened to the Beach Boys, used Sun-In to streak my hair, and got a coppery tan and a million more freckles every summer.
In college, we could rent a 5-bedroom beach house for $300 a month, but only between Labor Day and Memorial Day. It was worth it to move into town for the summer. This is when I fell in love with winters at the beach. Summer sunsets deepen in winter; orange-gold becomes vermillion, the sky a breath-snatching spectacle, the sun a giant crimson orb.
I fell in love between a passionate red sunset and a dreamy scarlet sunrise on the beach. I decided to marry while dancing on a deck overlooking the gulf, where dolphins dove in silvery arcs in the water below. Then I spent much of that 10-month marriage walking on the beach alone, crying, and trying to figure out what had gone wrong. Finally, I loaded exactly half of our possessions into my Volkswagon Super Beetle and headed down south to finish my degree and heal.
While I lived down south, my parents divorced and my mother sank, spiraling down into a hole of desperate sadness. Many late night calls sent me racing back to Pensacola to stop her from the threats she made. But one night she didn’t call. Instead she shot herself. On the morning of her funeral, I went out to the beach with a family friend. I was numb, robotic. That night I went back with my best friend, Carolyn. I hadn’t cried yet. We sat on the roof of her car and Carolyn said, “You need to cry, Terrie.” The night tides murmured and soothed me until I began to weep, then wail, then scream my broken heart out to the gulf.
Two years after my mother died, I married a remarkable man, quiet and funny, kind and strong. We had two golden-haired girls in quick succession, and life was good. Then Carolyn was killed in a car accident, and I sank for awhile too, lost without my best friend and kindred spirit. My family came to the beach with me when I met Carolyn’s mother to scatter her ashes into the morning tide. At the precise moment when we let them go, dolphins appeared, close to the shore, dancing in the waves, escorting my sister out to sea.
When our firstborn was 6 months old and our second was on the way, we began to join college friends at the beach for an annual reunion. As I write this, we are on our 20th year. Our daughters are both in college now, but they have wandered and swam, dug sand castles and searched for seashells, every year of their lives, right here, beside the Gulf of Mexico. Sometimes my husband and I couldn’t wait for naptime. Later, the girls couldn’t wait to get away from us. We have brought our love and our struggles, our faith and our pain to the beach with us, and in the center of a family closer than our blood kin, we sort it all out here, alongside the healing, restoring, murmuring tides.
I am fifty-one now. I’ve been in love with this body of water for over forty-five years. Tonight I sigh at the gilt-edged sunset and give thanks.
