Write What's In Front of You

Though gas prices had topped four dollars a gallon, I loaded my beach chair and sunscreen, my journal and pen, and opened wide my sunroof to drive south toward the Connecticut shoreline. Although my calendar told me it was just the first day of spring, my car’s thermometer kept inching higher into the seventies.

I thought I should be using the day responsibly, sitting at my computer and trying to write something. But I knew I would just keep looking out the window thinking, “On a day like this, I should be at the beach.” I couldn’t imagine a better way to celebrate winter’s end than by sticking my toes into the forty-seven degree water of the Long Island Sound. So I obeyed the call of the salt water in my veins, packed up my journal and a book full of prompts, and decided to indulge in a day of free writing.

My husband reminded me that temperatures would be much cooler along the shoreline and suggested I stay closer to home. As I watched my dashboard’s temperature display drop slowly, degree by degree, I realized he probably was right. Maybe I was being foolish heading to the beach so early in the season.

When I’d left the house, I hadn’t yet decided on which beach I was going to camp out. I figured, since I wouldn’t actually be going in the water, I could skip the swimming beaches and head for the one with picnic areas, formal gardens, and the sweeping lawn which sloped toward the water. If the day turned out to be too cold to sit near the water, I reasoned I could still curl up somewhere in the corner of a garden and breathe in some salt air.

I parked my car among few others and found only a handful of people sitting at picnic tables in the park. Most wore jackets and long pants against the chill of sea breeze in early spring. My husband had been right. I’d wasted gas and my morning making this drive. Still, because I was there, I needed to walk down to the boardwalk and onto the sand to feel it rub between my toes.

There was no wind, and the sand felt warmer than I’d expected. The sun, shielded by fog and mist, seemed determined to burn its way through and offer me some blue sky. I opened up my pink beach chair, sat down in the sand, and picked up my pen.

Write what’s in front of your face, said my book of writing prompts.

While in my neighborhood spring was erupting in a symphony of color, at the beach beige sand yielded only to gray. Gray fog enveloped gray water and gray sky. Water vapor rose out of warm sand, coaxed by sun still shielded by mist. Rocks cloaked in seaweed and silhouettes of waterfowl skimming the surface offered the only hints of boundary between earth and heaven. Rows of seashells washed ashore during winter months waited in abundance to be picked through and pocketed by summer visitors.

Quiet waves of water lapped against rock and sand. Low, somber notes of a foghorn warned in the distance. On a day like this, the necessity of foghorns along the rocky New England coastline became obvious.

Few others walked the lonely beach. In the distance, near a rocky outcropping, a trio of dogs on leash strained toward the water. Every so often one was set free to do what dogs were put on this earth to do, retrieve something tossed into the surf.

As I looked into the gray searching for things to write about, I noticed a man walking by himself along the water’s edge. He seemed lost in thought. As I watched him, I started thinking he looked an awful lot like my brother.

My brother and I live about ten miles away from one another. We attend the same church. Each Sunday, during coffee hour, we ask each other, “What’s new?” We exchange greetings. We compare notes on our most recent conversations with our mother.

What were the odds, I thought, that my brother and I would both end up on the same beach on the same early spring day, miles away from where either of us lived?

I watched the man walk further from me and tentatively, assuming I was mistaken, called out my brother’s name.

“I was just thinking I should have called you,” he said.

We sat together on the beach, each of us confident the sun was going to burn through the fog. We talked about beaches we’d visited together as children. We talked about family and faith and work and church and God. We swapped stories about raising teenage boys. We drank in salt air.

And we talked about the providence of God which, as it turns out, is sometimes right in front of our faces.

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