Growing up part-time in LA predisposes one to a life long quest for beach front property. Or so I thought.

All of my adult life, I’ve pondered the idea of someday owning a piece of beachfront and spending countless hours with my toes in the sand and my senses engulfed in the smell of the sea and sound of the surf. Thoughts of sand pushing back against my feet as I walk along the shore picking up seashells and tasting the salt in the air as it passes over my lips on the way inland, have kept me going back year after year.

I’ve taken trips to Southern California many times as an adult. My kids spent many hours playing in the surf and picking sand out of their hair. The ocean called and I answered with a sense of duty and terror driven enthusiasm. As much as I love the ocean, I have always been afraid of it.

As a small child, I was taken out from the safety of shore by a wicked rip-tide. I had more than just sand in my hair…I have faint memories of the sand and water spinning me around and scraping my face on the floor of the ocean and a wave crashing down on me just as I felt the mist in the air above the water. I don’t remember anything after that until my mom and lifeguards were rinsing the sand out of my eyes on the shore.

I guess being afraid is what made me want to go in. I had to face my fear. I got certified to dive and learned to snorkel and went in the ocean every chance I got! I swam with seals off the peer in Hermosa…I snorkeled over a shark off Catalina…I even swam in Shark Bay near Phi Phi Island. Granted…I didn’t know it was a shark haven until after I’d been in the water for quite some time. Thank goodness the boat some 100 yards away was feeding them, so they weren’t hungry when I was in the water.

I went to Cali again this past weekend. It wasn’t for pleasure. It was my uncle’s memorial service. I ran straight to the beach as soon as I got settled in the motel. The smell of salt in the air should have called me to get in…it didn’t. I thought maybe it was because I had the dogs with me and that the feeling to get in would come later when I didn’t have them with me. It never came. I took the dogs back again and still had no desire to get in the water. I wasn’t afraid. I just wasn’t called. I enjoyed the time on the beach and the dogs had a great time and loved all the new smells.

On the way back to the motel, from the last trip to the beach, I felt homesick. For the first time in my life, I was homesick for the wind on TMBR! I realized on that highway, that I didn’t need the ocean to make me happy. I am very happy when I hear the wind and the sounds of birds and and the quiet of a misty morning in the woods.

All the daydreams of buying a chunk of sand by the big water suddenly dissipated and I just wanted to get “HOME” to my little slice of heaven I call TMBR. I want to feel the sun on my face, the wind in my hair and hear the sound of my hawk as he swoops down from the heavens to buzz the dogs and look for ground squirrels.

It’s kinda funny how the universe works. You can spend all of your life looking for something that you don’t need. And, when you have all you ever wanted, you don’t see it.

To be, or not to be: that is the question:
Whether ‘tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,
Or to take arms against a sea of troubles,
And by opposing end them? To die: to sleep;
No more; and by a sleep to say we end
The heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks
That flesh is heir to, ‘tis a consummation
Devoutly to be wish’d. To die, to sleep;
To sleep: perchance to dream: ay, there’s the rub;
For in that sleep of death what dreams may come
When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,
Must give us pause: there’s the respect
That makes calamity of so long life;
For who would bear the whips and scorns of time,
The oppressor’s wrong, the proud man’s contumely,
The pangs of despised love, the law’s delay,
The insolence of office and the spurns
That patient merit of the unworthy takes,
When he himself might his quietus make
With a bare bodkin? who would fardels bear,
To grunt and sweat under a weary life,
But that the dread of something after death,
The undiscover’d country from whose bourn
No traveller returns, puzzles the will
And makes us rather bear those ills we have
Than fly to others that we know not of?
Thus conscience does make cowards of us all;
And thus the native hue of resolution
Is sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought,
And enterprises of great pith and moment
With this regard their currents turn awry,
And lose the name of action.—Soft you now!
The fair Ophelia! Nymph, in thy orisons
Be all my sins remember’d.
~William Shakespeare