Water Is My Existence
In both body and soul.
I woke up this morning trying to hang on to a fragment of my dream, remembering only that I was with my family at an unfamiliar cottage on a large body of water feeling lucky that the strangers outside let us use it, while noting that, as kitchens go, there wasn’t one. My daughter wanted to make pumpkin pies and I found two disposable pie pans in the cupboard, but no oven to bake them in. That was it. That was all I could remember.
But as I was thinking about it, I realized that my dreams involve locations that are never the same but are always — I mean always — at water’s edge. I am never inland in my dreams. I laughed out loud.
Except for the year we lived on the Mojave Desert in California, I’ve lived around water all of my life. I loved the high desert and the people in it, but I found my ‘water fix’, even then, at a woodsy oasis a few miles from our house. A river ran through it.
We’ve lived in a small one-bedroom ocean-front in Ventura, California, and spent two years on Maui in three different houses, two of them at the ocean, one in sight of it. We worked in the city for 32 years but managed frequent R&Rs at our small cottage on a small lake, until we sold it and retired to the island. There was never any question that we would have to live near water.
