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Tuesday, Mar. 18, 2003
I�m going to go completely off-kilter today and write a bit about someone I�ve never met, may never meet. To do so before it is too late, one of those timid hesitations that we forget about, and forget too many times. It is a testament to the tendrils of the internet that I write about a person unmet, those ghostly fragments of things that we call personas on airwaves of type and prose. Those things that lay unraveled, where words make whole beings out of what is unseen and unknown.

But for Jenn , my Battened down buddy of salty air and things of rope and canvas, this is a moment. And it deserves something, maybe something more than the spray of a fast sloop on a cold day. Something right. Something of chapels and lace mixed with people large in vestments and solemn of tone. One minute of pledging the finest of what we have as persons on earth to another.

There are days, too many days, spent stuffing cheese sandwiches in bags. Spent in lilting cries over things that could have been but never will. Duffel bag days of full hassocks and empty sails, glassy bays, rain on decks.

A day years hence, perhaps, it will come. When dark skies tell of rain and stars shoot unbounded over backyards yet seen, houses yet lived in. When something particularly luminous bounds through the sky and chuckles the heart with the delight of it all, a comet, a fragment of fiery tail. And the one closest to you takes your hand in silence, and as two souls you see what you cannot touch. Without words, what you cannot taste. But it will be there. Without sound, the knowing of life between the two of you will clasp fingers and breathe silent the love of one man, and one woman. Without words, for words would ruin it. But smiles, and a run for the house before the rain falls again.

There will be a stamp upon you, a mark. The absolute perfection of living well and living as one. That feeling of knowing without care that when that one crooks finger you must, must go. That beckoning, the relief of knowing that perhaps, after all, there is a finding at long last. And that there is a rightness about it.

There is a sun, and light and heat follow it as surely as the clouds make long attempt to hide it. There is wind to cool you, and hands to make good the knots you tie, to anchor and hold sail to mast. It is good to stand with the one you love on a long clear day, on a boat of wood and a sheet of water. To stand with hair knotted and arms tired, and know that there is a blessed warm sun to chase down the evening and a cold drink to share.

There are days that we live for.

For Jenn, and for Rick. I stand at the dock and loft a frothy salute to you, for words cannot carry all the way to the boat that carries you into the light. Be well, and sail fearless into waters that beckon you. Carry safe what you have today. Be glad for each morning that wakens you with hair burrowed into a shoulder of warm skin, and the knowledge that it is the one.

The one you�ve sailed down the reach to find, and hold fast to.

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