Salty

I’ve known Ocean Breeze for 11 years now, and from the beginning of our friendship, she and I have shared stories about the places we love. Last week at her beach house, she showed me the eastern tip of a very long island, a place she’s known since she was a baby.

She took me to the bluff on the beach where the bank swallows live, and we watched them darting in and out of their holes in the morning light. We walked through docks of fishing boats where a local fisherman was bathing with a hose after a morning of fishing. We watched men in their fifties gliding on waves at a beach they’ve been surfing since childhood. We climbed on the jetty behind the lighthouse, did a walking meditation in a garden filled with art, and spent one evening around a campfire on the beach, singing and talking long after the sun went down.

I was with a group of wonderful women, nature writers mostly, and we would have had fun talking, writing, and eating no matter where we were. But it was especially amazing to gather in the incredibly beautiful landscape that Ocean Breeze has been telling me about for years.