Regrouping

There are times when my life seems to be spent unraveling the same knot day after day with the result that it just grows tighter and more unsolvable. My solution since I was a small kid was to pack a bag and run away. Granted at 8 or 9 I didn't go far or for long with my pillow stuffed in my little suitcase along with some peanut butter sandwiches. Sometimes I slept in the grape arbor in the yard and at others in an ancient tree house in the woods. Sixty years later this is still my solution. I pack better and usually these days find a place inside to sleep. Not that sleeping under the stars doesn't still whisper to me; it's too hard to sleep on the ground and trying to get up off an air mattress, oh my! So I left for the Oregon coast with my sister, reservations at Wheeler by the Bay, and a tic in my eye I'd had for three weeks. Let the ocean breezes blow the cobwebs out of my brain.

I tried not so much to stifle old thoughts as to let new views into my eyes and my heart. The view by our room was wonderful but one the first things I saw were these delicate flowers. The owners here have planted flower boxes on each of the little decks on the backside of the rooms. The weather was healing, 70, not the scalding 100 degrees with blowing dust at home.

I called this my Watergate, but unlike some others when you walk through this arch you leave your tangled webs behind. Plop yourself on a bench on the deck, inhale deeply, hear the birds, and feel the slight damp of the morning fog on your skin as the sun evaporates it and warms your spirit. We watched the sun go down from here. By the next morning my tic had left and I no longer carried an aggrieved spirit.

We spent an evening watching an Osprey hunting up and down the long bay, turning and diving for food as the twilight came on and the sun went down. Now, I know there are those that would tell you, you can't run away from your problems, but, sometimes you can for awhile at least, and with great comfort to your soul.