Nadia Part One

A WINTER MORNING

Overcast eyes, cloudy and grey, a desolate cool beach morning unsure how the day will begin—and like your eyes, so is your heart. You are a woman.
You wake up before dawn and walk along the cool, dark water’s edge. Waves spray salty mist across the flat newly groomed sand, in your face and on your tongue. Low tide smells of rotting seal corpse, fishy and spoiled, yet refreshing. The smell reminds you of the many mornings when walks transformed into cleansing swims. When waves pounded out your frustration, a mother’s caress, a mother’s tough love, because the water has redeeming qualities, reminiscent cool stinging prickles of salt that burnt off the night-before’s layer of skin.
But today, like those recently, do not follow with a swim. You are a wanderer now, in search of driftwood not to carve nor to store on empty racks inside a tomb, garage. You admire. Where did it come from? Where is it going; or will it be seen again?
Water coats your feet. You never wear shoes and your rolled pant legs stick to your calves, rubbing salty sand up and down as you walk.
A flock of toddler sandpipers run an instinctual choreography in and out with the waves, the dance of their mass, grey-brown reflectors of the dawn. Their little legs so close to the sand, reminds you more of your youth when the earth was closer to you and yet, today the earth and you are closer than ever before.