Later than usual and much shorter. I have not slept well. I know I need to wake to saying goodbye to one daughter, perhaps that’s a bit disrupting. We wait for her Uber under the fresh sky before my walk. The pull of a melancholy. The shift. She is here, so very much here, and now she’ll be gone. And we have had so many minutes of walking and laughing, talking and being by the birds and the waves, and even in the silences of our naps near each other. The Uber arrives. She departs. I walk to the lagoon and back, feeling gratitude. Saying thanks for the special time we have shared. I have not worked on a poem in a few days, and today is not a writing day. But tonight I run my monthly critique group and appreciate very much the writing of others and the discussion of craft. My own writing time will return soon. Tonight, I have the shushing of the waves outside the windows in the quiet house. The immensity of the Gulf, all the life and most of it I’ll never meet or know or even understand. There it is out there! All the sea creatures great and small alive and necessary. How very small it is to be me, listening near my one lamp lit in this dark.