Body of Water

Google “why do people love water” and you’ll get a lot of explanations. Some scientists think people come by their affinity for water instinctively because after all, humans are mostly water. Others think there’s some primeval resonance with water based on evolution. Then there’s the theory that we just like shiny, glistening things. Maybe some or all of that is true. I think I came by it genetically.

My parents both loved the beach. They grew up going to the shore, and in turn, they shared that love with me. My dad used to say, “It never rains at the beach” to convince us it was worth driving there even if it was pouring at home. We went in every season just to be near the water, even bundled in coats and hats and hoodies. My folks taught me the joy of long walks to the jetty, body-surfing the whitecaps, hunting for rocks and shells, watching the gulls screech and dive across the sky, getting out the binoculars to peer at ships on the horizon. I still hear my mother’s voice expressing, even in her final years, the desire to “feel the sand between my toes.”

 I was reminded of all this when my mom died in August 2019. From childhood, the ocean beaches were, I believe, a place she felt most alive and at home. And like the ocean itself, my mother’s love was broad and deep.

Among my mother’s most treasured books was Ann Morrow Lindbergh’s A Gift From the Sea, written in 1955, two years before my mom and dad married. A copy sat on the coffee table in our living room throughout our childhood, and I recall leafing through it then, not understanding much of its meditations on life, on marriage, on love—a kind of love my mom both believed in and wrestled with:

“When you love someone, you do not love them all the time, in exactly the same way, from moment to moment. [Yet we} insist on permanency, on duration, on continuity; when the only continuity possible, in life as in love, is in growth, in fluidity—in freedom…. Relationships must be like islands, one must accept them for what they are here and now, within their limits—islands, surrounded and interrupted by the sea, and continually visited and abandoned by the tides.” 

 I return again and again to the ocean’s edge, the bank of the river, the gentle slope where the grass meets the lake. I return there to daydream, to doze, to remind myself of love, to breathe, to remember, and to photograph. This is some of what I’ve seen and felt.