The in between

Here along the edge of Long Island Sound, the by-the-minute stretching and relaxing of the ocean, is called tides.  High, low, as well as storm and neap tides are the constancy we lookers live with. The time of tide I find most interesting, and a bit confusing, is during the milliseconds when the ocean rests; it’s the breath the water takes just before it flips to either coming in or going out.  When you’re watching, it’s almost impossible to tell when it switches to going the other way. But, if you’ve stood on the shore long enough to feel your feet settle deeper in the sand as the water washes you in, you know, because you know.

My feet have settled in life long enough to know that for us, all of us, the tide has flipped. Storms-a-comin’, yup. Washouts, hell yes. Hard to know exactly when the rain, wind and flooding will stop so I turn to the experts who used to have all the answers and now speculate.

Within the family dynamic some flipping has been going on here too. Good flips, flips beckoning the sun in a good way, a very good way, almost too good. Is that possible?

For me-the-writer, I’m still taking a breath, paused at the shore wondering if I’m going out or coming in. Maybe it’s the time of year, so much going on, or maybe it just is what it is: the in between.

If I’m out of the sand flats the tide will soon overtake me, and if I’m standing at the high-water line, it will be going out without me. So what do I do? I pay attention.

When was the last time your tide flipped? And, were you paying attention?

The post recently entered here has been deleted because of consideration for traditional publication. I want to thank my writer-friends for their thoughtful comments. Though gratefully apreciated they will not be used.

This is kind of exciting actually.

Yellow is her favorite color

My ‘almost’ 3 year old granddaughter wouldn’t nap today.  That’s okay. Usually she conks out and sleeps for a couple of hours, but today she just rested, read a block-book a few hundred times and talked to her dolly and herself. I have her one day a week, and that day is as special and as sweet as a bowl of peach swirl in July or cocoa and whipped cream in January.

Because she was awake I brought her downstairs, “to rest” in the hopes that couch and snuggles might do the trick. I closed my eyes, she settled against me, and quietly her little voice began to sing, “We all live in a yellow submarine, yellow submarine, yellow submarine...,” over and over like a whispering mantra. So sweet, it was everything I could do to hold back tears.

When Yellow Submarine was released by the Beatles in 1969 I had just returned home from living for a year in South Africa. As a young women (and Beatles fan) back in The States, after experiencing an unforgettable opportunity, it never occurred to me to think forward. At that age we’re so engrossed in the ‘now’ of life that imagining the road ahead beyond the next class, or job, or relationship is simply unthinkable.

So today I thought back to the 1960’s young woman who sang a hardy rendition of Yellow Submarine in the car whenever it came on the radio. Never did I ever imagine that my ‘almost’ three year old granddaughter would love and sing the very same song while snuggling against me, a woman in my 60s years later.

At my age generational things like that are eye opening. Whether it’s spurred by the actual music, or cartoons on TV, realizing the connection that hops a generation I find interesting. I didn’t play Beatles music when my kids were growing up but my daughters loved John, Paul, George and Ringo. My youngest was a real posters-hanging-on-college-room-walls fan. Maybe liking what I liked was a given. But, it was never as heart moving as this little-one whispering a song that years ago played over and over in my head when the idea of being married, having children and grandchildren was as far from thought as being an adult orphan.

I think being a writer of essays, a memoirist and op-ed writer, has something to do with this. We inner-brain writers, we self-examiners, we emotional-unloaders, have to dig deep and splay ourselves in order to be heard and read and understood. Because we search inside our psyches often, Yellow Submarine incidents take on self-historical importance.

I’ve often told my kids to sometimes think forward so that they may understand just how lucky they are to be young. But they don’t. And I guess that’s the way it’s supposed to be. I never did and though it took half a century to realize how lucky I was back then, I get it now. Because while an ‘almost’ three year old leaned against my heart today, I realized that no matter the years which separate us…“We all live in a yellow submarine, yellow submarine, yellow submarine...