sand and sky and sea

Today began with a hormone crash and then progressed steeped in a black mood, so I'm taking a little mental vacation to a year ago, when Laura married Keith and I went for the first time out of the Continental United States (also, for the first time, on a plane) to Grand Cayman to be their honored maid.

All my life I haven't been much of a beach person. I like, and liked, the rocky shale shores of Lake Erie, I like, and liked, Presque Isle; but on an ordinary day, give me the woods. Give me secretive green trees and fragrant pines, give me the noisy silence of cracking branches and leaves in the wind and running creeks and foraging squirrels, give me the red-brown-gold interplay of light and shadow on the carpeted ground.

So I didn't expect to like the Caymans much. I went, for Laura's sake, because she has always loved the beach, and I decided to suffer it with a smile.

I was completely romanced and swept off my feet by the ceaseless salty wind. I was lifted to joy by the absolution of serenity in the sky. I was moved by the moving, the susurrating water to a peace deeper and more all-consuming than I have ever felt before. I was happy. I was light. I was beautiful. At the edge of the water-loving, water-loved world, I was unbound, reborn, utterly myself, anonymous and intimately known, empty and filled, whole and hollow and present and now and young and limitless -- content, and wild, and free.

I spent every morning and evening walking up and down the beach by the inn, looking over the water, watching the colors change and the force of the waves break against the reef, and scouting the sand for interesting bits of shells and glass and coral and pottery. I walked in my two-piece, or my long backless dress, or my cotton pajamas, uncaring who might see me, unselfconscious. I learned to light a cigarette from a match in fifteen-mile-an-hour wind. I loved the briney smell in our suite, the little balcony in my room that overlooked the street, the frigid bathroom with beautiful tiles, the innkeeper's cats who would step inside for a visit and ask to leave at five. Everything was bright and fully manifest. The elements were merciful. Living was gracious and easy, that quiet time of the year; the people were kind.

And the night of the wedding in my sea-green dress I watched my sister radiant with her husband, I laughed with her friends, I danced till I couldn't breathe, I waded in the surf, and I felt giddy with champagne and a forceful surge of completeness, of love and joy and hope all meeting in that space around me like the sand and sky and sea, and I knew for certain that I was immortal, and deeply loved.