The Sky, the Sand, and the Sea
Finn is our sixth Golden Retriever puppy together. The sixth to steal our hearts and nip our fingertips. The sixth to feel nervous at first about the way that the waves flip to crash on the sand. The sixth to slowly overcome that fear, wave by wave and morning by morning.
And so, when I’m sleeping on crisp white sheets at an inn by the sea, and the alarm chimes that sunrise is hurtling towards us in twenty minutes, it gets a little bit easier each morning to haul my old bones vertical.
My joints might creak a little more each morning, but my knowledge that time makes spaces rare and private is better buoyancy than youth and coffee ever were.
And some of those rare spaces face east.
Dogs don’t go to church, but they have more soul than most people.
And when the sun is just breaking the horizon, there’s a church for the both of us. One for me to watch the sun light the clouds on fire where the sky meets the sea, and one for Finn to dance and smell where the sea meets the sand.
Three mornings on the Cape, and on each of them, one or the other of us found the momentum to steal down to a remote section of beach with a little dog who doesn’t know anything about which beaches allow him on which dates, or how waves work, but who is always happy to be a boon companion and to try to figure out why his human is breathing deep while looking at the sky over the sea when he knows that sniffing shallow at edge of the sea and the sand is the better trip to church.