I spent the day on a floating dock at the Delta Bay Marina.  Music kept our toes tapping and a few hips swiveling.  Far from the land-locked Midwest of my first six decades, I found myself drawing huge, healing breaths of cool air and shaking my head in wonder.

Tomorrow morning I head west sixty miles or so then turn left and take a little jaunt down the coastal highway.  By mid-day, I’ll be at the Pescadero State Beach.  I will watch the sun set over my Pacific from a deck chair behind the Dolphin House, where my belongings will be neatly stacked under my usual bottom bunk by the window.

My life has taken many turns but I seem to have finally found a place where peace envelopes me.  From the open window, I hear a bird calling across the darkened meadow.  Earlier today, a hummingbird hovered near my face for an astonishingly long moment.  Never would I have predicted how easily I would take root here on Andrus Island.  If someone had told me, “Next year, you’ll throw all caution to the wind and cast your lot on the banks of the San Joaquin in California’s Central Valley,” I would have sent them for a psychiatric evaluation.

Yet here I am; and here I will stay. As anyone from Kansas City can attest, there’s no place like home, especially when home has all the trappings of paradise.

It’s the first day of the fifty-seventh month of My Year Without Complaining.  Life continues.