{Thursday, March 18, 11:49 a.m.}

<<the sea, myself, and i>>

today i played with the Pacific Ocean and the northwest wind. my roommates and i woke up to branches beating our windows like billy-o and the generator humming away as we’d lost all power (and phone service too). now when you live on a beach, there is only one thing to do in a windstorm and that is to go on a jolly long explore. which i did.

i scurried down to the edge of the roiling, boiling sea and walked along watching the drunken gulls lurch and keel over the whitecaps and listening to the madrona leaves clatter with fright. past the floating dock which bucked and bowed like a delighted seafaring caterpillar, i leapt over logs and spun across the pebbles. the wind poured into my mouth, drowning me with every breath. i tiptoed across a wet, wobbly log as the waves came cresting, crashing towards me … then scrambled up the solid slope of a sunbaked rock (covered in periwinkle and sage lichen fine as peeling paint) to sit and watch and write and wonder. <<there is so much You>>

forth again i sallied, first to slip on slick shale and pick myself up laughing, then to balance on a spindly log as long as i could before an extra-strong gust knocked me off. <<not fair! you pushed me!>> defiantly waving a victory stick swathed in seaweed high overhead, i skipped unevenly over the smooth-scraped sand until i came to an impenetrable impasse of rock bounded on one side by cliff and on the other by ocean. <<impasse, my foot! and nothing calls itself impenetrable to meg!>> the victory stick was instantly laid aside and the impasse conquered by an ingenious strategy which addressed neither the cliff nor the ocean but rather the rock itself. in short, up and over, to drop neatly down again into a cosy three-sided cave-ish business. i peered over the top of the most seaward rock just in time to be drenched by the spray of a wave breaking over it. <<not the face! how many times do i have to tell you?!>>

yet the spirit of victory (tho not, unfortunately, the personage of the stick) lived on as i walked to the end of the bucking, bowing dock, sliding back and forth as it tipped steeply on each swell like a tiny boat. the wind blew my hoodie out so it rather looked as if i was with child. <<not yet, mr. wind, but when that time comes i shall teach her to play with you too>> then i stretched out my arms and flew back home with the wind at my back to be met by several staff who informed me not to go out on the dock anymore by any means. and i should at least have been wearing a life jacket. and if i had gone in, nobody would have been able to go in after me. but mona, our outspoken grandma gardener, sidled up to me as i stood watching the water and said with a wink, “i enjoyed what you did.” and i winked back at her because

<<so did i.>>