Aching

The day is sparkling down here.  Behind Ben surfing, the horizon is lined with sailboats, and despite the bracing air and water cold enough to take your breath, Silas and Eden are wearing bathing suits, squealing as the waves knock their knees.

It's been another day of goodbyes, and my heart is too tender to say anymore.  So I am lying down in the sand, letting it hold my whole body and give me its day's worth of sun-warmth.

We have brought no towels or shoes.  Catalina is hazy across the water, but we still wave to Kaia Joye, as always.  The tide is low, exposing a stretch of smooth sand littered with broken mussels and unhinged coquinas.  Strange that this will be a place my kids visit instead of live.  Strange that Eden may not remember it at all and Silas only vaguely, this whole life we've lived together.  What they will identify clearly as theirs is a place we haven't arrived yet, a house whose walls we haven't touched.