New Year's Day on Camano Island

 

A beautiful New Year's Day on Camano Island, looking north across peaceful waters

The snow of mid-December had melted. 

The rain had stopped. 

The winds had been spent.

The top of 2023 was looking pretty fine. It was a calm, sunny New Year's Day and it was a great time to visit one of our favorite shores for strolling and holding hands. It was a great day for the two of us to walk along the edge of salt water, stepping over surf-rounded stones as some sea birds flew above and some others dove below the placid waters. 

We spent the short hours of light allotted to this latitude hopping from one topic to another, often we swung back to ponder geologic coastal depositional strata or the mineral assemblage of a curious, wave-swept boulder. We are a good pair when we are among our solid friends, the rocks and stones of Camano Island.

She lives and works in Texas. She lives a normal life. 

I have left a normal life life in Texas behind. I have left her in Texas as I chase a dream. 

I seek a quiet house among the trees along the bank of Pilchuck Creek, and there I long to live with my wife as we  host friends and family at our table and welcome the wash of the coming years in tranquility. I may yet have my myth emerge from the shadows, and stride into the light of reality. Chasing a dream has a high toll to take from me in time away from Susan and the neglect of the Texas home. 

She tells me this is my Odyssey; I am Odysseus and like him, the fates have kept me away from making a home with her. She is Penelope, Odysseus' wife, weaving everyday at her loom to await the fulfillment of our dream together. If so, finding myself in the middle of myth is difficult to endure.

I savor the minutes together. I have always found her most alluring when she has the wind in her hair and she is settled against a weathered log, or perched like a siren atop a large rock. I ask her to pause, lean against that log and to look at me. I want to remember this, I want to take a photograph.

Susan cooperates and the shutter clicks. We wander off down the beach. I love our moments together.

Kelp of the sea is stranded upon the salt-and-pepper texture of a Canadian granite.

I seldom see myself in a mirror, but I feel I have gone feral.

Every rock tells a story

Roots of a once towering tree rise on the beach and turn to the setting sun. It is a fine day. May all of 2023 be so.