Home to the mother sea

Of course I did:  I jumped at the chance to spend a night at Pigeon Point.  With fresh sourdough bread and eggs that have never been refrigerated, I pulled into the handicapped parking space at 4:30.  I swung my bag with a delicious ease as I walked the sidewalk to the office.  Though Michael’s smiling face no longer greets visitors, the clerk remembered me.  

An hour later, I started taking supplies from my backpack.  I shared portabella and oil with a German couple making pasta with a few meager items on their last night in the States.  For myself, I cooked potato and mushroom with green onion to garnish and creamy butter for the crusty bread from the Pie Ranch.  

As the evening grew gentle around us, more visitors grouped around the dining room table — Sarah from Southern California; a pair from Singapore by way of SF; one or two others whose cities and names I did not catch.  Outside, in the glow of a sunset hidden behind low clouds, I met Mark from Oakland who talked of the month which he and his wife had just spent in Portugal.  Latecia from Sacramento showed me pictures of the bounty from her husband’s garden, speaking in a slightly wistful voice of the cattle which kept him from coming with her.

I spied a crop of surprise lilies straining westward..  I understood the urge.   Pelicans and sea gulls made their eternal way past the rocks in the cove.  I stood in the fading light of another perfect day in paradise, and forgot whatever it was that awakened me in the middle of the previous night, leaving me anxious for most of the day.  The mother sea offered her enduring comfort.  I yielded to her embrace.

It’s the seventeenth day of the sixty-eighth month of My Year Without Complaining.  Life continues.

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