Low clouds, gray-blue and warm air. We don’t walk, we take the bikes so my daughter can film on Beer Can Island. She has only a little time before leaving for her flight. It’s brief time, alone together, and I’m grateful. We find a beach tee pee, constructed over the past day, and she uses it in her film. She does not yet know what her film will be. We talk over her nascent ideas while we pedal the bikes, and they’re good ones. She will create a film about group therapy and the expressive arts, and it will involve dance and also birds. I trust her ideas, her instincts, her vision. She has a lot to say. I will miss her. When we finish filming, we return. She packs. We get on my computer and make the deposit for graduate school - she has made her choice. My other daughter packs. I make breakfast for all and everyone gathers in the kitchen, filling plates of scrambled eggs and fruit. The time of all of us here is over. The Uber is in the driveway to take four of them away. It’s suddenly hectic, I’m distracted, there are hugs and thanks and they are gone. And now, we have a reservation for kayaks - with my son and his fiancee, so I have no time to feel this departure, we’re making a picnic and suddenly we’re gliding across the lagoon to the bay under the clouds that are clearing. It’s the same route we took with the girls, with far less wind. The same picnic at Beer Can Island, and I feel a bit of the heartbreak; but our conversation is rich and deep. My son has ideas about retreats he wants us to create at home, he has a vision for all day silent retreats we’ll make with each other and we’ll meditate and do yoga and kayak and hike. . . and now I’m just aware of how much the values I wanted to share with them as they grew they’ve grown into. This young man, those college years, when he rarely talked. The music loud. He learned to make cd’s of our favorite music, or music he knew we’d like, so he could play them in the car and he wouldn’t have to talk! After the picnic, and all the talking, we paddle back, our foursome, and it isn’t until we’re back in the lagoon at the very end that we see him – the dolphin, who has swum into the channel of the lagoon from the bay and he’s feeding on something and breeching and dipping right next to our kayaks! We’re enthralled and enchanted, and we follow his fin as he swims around the lagoon, and then out again into the bay, and we paddle quickly, following, until he is out of sight. The girls text later, home safe and sound and sending thanks.