#NewThisDay Writing From My Photo Stream

Up early, for the first time, before the new time of sunrise. As soon as it’s light I go to the beach and walk to the bridge. I beat most of the shell pickers. I am thinking about this special day. After a couple of hours working on my computer, I will drive to Tampa Airport, this time, to pick up my middle child and her fiance. I realize the kids are arriving, two by two in couples, staggered arrivals, sort of in the same way they were born – each five years apart. I realize I will have had a few days alone with the youngest, and a few days alone with the oldest, but the middle one will share her time here entirely. She won’t mind. I drive to the airport and they get this ride back with me, alone, to Longboat Key. First, we must stop and buy her a wheelchair. She has re-injured a broken ankle from two years ago and she’s on crutches, just as she was when I took a trip, alone, just her and me, to Southern California the year she first broke it. In Walmart we find a transport chair, and by late afternoon, we are wheeling her across the street to the beach. Her fiance helps her to the water, and then she is floating and shouting, happily, “I feel so free!” I don’t have a broken ankle, but that’s how I felt, too, this morning as I slipped into the Gulf at the end of my walk before leaving the beach. Like a mermaid, a little bit. Stretching and moving so buoyantly in the warm salty water under the huge sky, under the flight of the pelicans fishing.