There’s a dairy company in the Bay Area called Berkeley Farms, and one of their milk carton slogans is, “Farms? In Berkeley?”
I will now co-opt it. Joy? With Cancer?
The answer, sisters and brothers, is hell yeah. Because fuck cancer and its thievery. If you’re in treatment, there can come a level of exhaustion like low tide before a tsunami that is so deeply and utterly draining that you cannot see any shore. The dry and distant ocean floor, broken sea shells, rotting kelp, driftwood, spaced between long distances of drying sand–the metaphorical and barren landscape for even getting water becomes a distance so far and difficult that rest and floating in a haze of whowhatwhere is the only option. And that’s just the first few days.
But I digress.
We are talking about joy. I am talking about the resurgence of fresh water, when the tide returns, when some semblance of normalcy comes back to the body.
It is summer vacation, and I’m so grateful to have this time with my daughter. She’s entering high school next year, which means that the needs and tendings of little-kid childhood are receding. They will always be there, as they are all of us, but there is a shift. A shift outward, as in looking out to sea. In this spirit, the two of us went to the Fitzgerald Marine Reserve yesterday. This is in Moss Beach, CA, south of San Francisco. The reserve is not well known, but it has some of the best tide pools I’ve ever seen. Such was yesterday that we saw harbor seals, anemones, European green crabs, and one native red rock crab that snatched another small hermit as it attempted to scuttle free.
The day was grey, overcast, perfect.
The rocks were slippery but the pools beckoned.
And afterwards, we took a hike along the bluff. Always I slip back into metaphor – I can’t help it. The small gaze, the larger. The bluff and the pool. But as we walked along the edge I couldn’t help feeling grateful for all of it – the water, the land, even the dark cloud cover that offered a kind of comfort against being too brightly lit. Who can take constant light, after all? The risk is of burning.
We continued, found some beautiful trees.
And then took some time to sit under them.
Joy, I think, doesn’t have to be noisy.
Pink Stinks 