The Summer We Said Goodbye [Installment 19]

Red Dawn

The trail to the beach was only a block and a half away, and I took off to catch as much of the dawn as I could, half-sliding, half-tumbling down the bluff's steep embankment under a canopy of leafless Hickories and Oaks.

For those who don't know it, Lake Michigan is not your typical lake. None of the Great Lakes are. For one thing, you can't see across it. It's just an endless expanse of water, like an ocean, capable of generating weather patterns violent enough to sink the most seaworthy of vessels.

But unlike an ocean, it also has a capacity for remarkable calm.

I picked my way through the driftwood scattered along the shore and aligned my toes with its glassy edge.

Clouds completely shrouded the sky, diffusing the sunlight from a fireball rising over the water into a gradient of ruby reds fanning in all directions.

The persistence of the light's tonality was exceptional. Not a shred of peach nor wisp of rose broke through — not even an edge of purple where it collided with slate gray stratus clouds rolling in from the west.

Everything was perfectly set — as if it had been waiting for me to arrive at that exact moment to lock itself into place.

Even the ripples at my feet ceased lapping, and I exhaled my breath completely, suspended somewhere between the sky and its red reflection in the water's mirrored surface, feeling no compunction to inhale another.

My heart thumped, and a pride welled up within me. For what, I didn't know. Showing up? Of what consequence was that?

And yet, I knew that had to be it.

Until that moment, my life had been contrived from a catalog of choices made by others long before I'd even been contemplated.

I hadn't agreed to any of it, especially the divorce, which had left my mother bitter and my father absent. And yet I'd gone along with it all, adopting the limitations of my family as my own because of some unspoken assumption that belonging had to be earned, and the price was my individuality.

But this atmospheric unfolding before me was mine and mine alone. I had been the one to tap its potential when, tossing off my mother's throw and rolling out of my father's recliner, I'd set off with nothing more than a tug of intuition and curiosity to guide me.

Could an encounter as life-affirming as this be sourced so innocuously?

Oh, the banality of wonder!

The answer was yes, my father's warning be damned!

I knew what I had to do.

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You can find an archive of past installments here.