Views From the Buena Vista

The beginning of our week started out like this.  Threatening clouds, wild waves, and just enough pounding rain to keep me inside with the shades raised high and a stack of books close to my side yet my eyes remained mostly trained on the horizon, my mind thick with thoughts.  I enjoy the sun, but I live for these dramatic days on the Pacific shoreline in which nature puts on the most spectacular of displays.  There is something about the turmoil on the outside matching the turmoil on the inside that creates a feeling of symbiosis deep within my soul.  I am drawn down into thought.  Thoughts about where I have been, thoughts about where I am now, and thoughts about where I will someday be.  The notary came by, last week, to have Mark and I sign paper after paper after paper as we are refinancing our beach home for a much better rate than we were able to lock into almost four years ago.  The words "in thirty years" flowed easily from the notary's mouth and stopped me cold in my thoughts as my hand systematically signed and signed and signed and signed and dated.  In thirty years I will be eighty years old.  80 years old.  My four Angel Daughters will be as old, or older than I am right now at this moment in time.  My nieces will be in their late thirties and early forties.  My parents will, most likely, be gone.  Long gone.  And my brother, he will still be only 41 years old...Has he had the chance to meet one of our heros, the larger than life Clarence Clemons, yet?  Dear God, I hope so.

Rainy days cause these kinds of thoughts to bubble up to the surface of my being.  The thoughts simmer there, oftentimes for days, bringing with them feelings of nostalgia, regret, hope, and renewal.

And as I take my old girl, my dog, Becca, outside, something in the water to the left of the bluff catches my attention and I am momentarily caught off-guard.  I hold my breath so as not to lose sight.  The surface of the water breaks with circular swirls of tiny bubbles.  Breath.  Air.  Life.  And then a fin...

And as I look down, she appears, gliding lazily along on currents.  My breathing somehow syncs along with her graceful dance along the water.  Under, above, under, above, like my moods when the rain comes and then leaves.

That evening, the sun returned just in time for sundown, the water smooth as glass.  It is 80 degrees outside here today.  The only clouds in the sky are wisps of cotton against the most beautiful of blues.  I am here, back to today, back to thirty one years away from my 80th year, back to life as it is.  I like it here. How to make the next thirty years slow down to a pace which does not feel like here and then gone?  That is the question that lays heavy on my heart.