After The Storm
After the storm, the mud lay thick on the floor, oozing its way into every crevice of the house.
After the storm, the building where Mary and I first kissed lay scattered in pieces throughout the mangroves.
After the storm, there were plenty of good things to talk about, so why does the news only report about the bad?
Watching Over The Island
The debris fan spread out from the West Cottage like an airplane crash, objects smashed and scattered into a million tiny pieces. Strangely, there is no mud here. On the island, it must have all been water, wave after wave washing over it, battering all in its path. I sift through the pile and run across a familiar face, the picture pristine amongst the carnage. Tucker never did much like storms, but he seems to have sat through this one just fine.
The Stories We Write
There is a pile of mud soaked things growing higher in the front yard. My well-curated collection of sea kayaking books and a good sized portion of my Outward Bound instructor resources are a sodden mess somewhere near the bottom. I’ve held onto these things for years, but I couldn’t tell you when was the last time I opened up one of those sea kayaking books or used any of my resources on course.
In the end, the pile in the yard is just a collection of objects, their only value is in the memories I have attached to them, and as I grow older, even those fall by the wayside, more stuff added to the discard pile. Life is not defined by the objects, or the memories that we cling to. It is written in disappearing ink about what we are doing right here, right now.
We have arrived at our first stop: my hometown of Huntsville, Alabama with a car overflowing with stuff that must be culled before we continue westward. It was a whirlwind as we desperately scrambled to find a place for all the things that filled our one bedroom apartment. I had thought we had done a good job of downsizing our possessions when we sold our home back in September, but the mountains of material that we sorted and shuffled over the past few days left me feeling overwhelmed and at times paralyzed. Though I feel the freedom of life on the road creeping into my bones, the burden of the stuff we left behind still weighs heavily on me.