You know you’re in Florida when you are checking out at the grocery store, and the January sky is cobalt blue without a cloud, and the temperature is 60°, and the cashier says to you “Stay warm!”

You know you’ve found a mate when he goes mattress shopping with you, because my mattress which about 7 years old, is rolling us to the center of it at night. And he pays for half of it. Because he sleeps on it half the week. Because we are now at a point where we both think of our things as ours, not as his and mine. It’s just so easy.

He gave me a keyboard for Christmas. A Yamaha, 76 keys. It can play all kinds of instruments, and percussion, and rhythms. I have wanted one since I moved out of the house I lived in with my ex. I took piano lessons as a girl, for 4 or 5 years. My high school boyfriend was a pretty good guitarist and sometimes we’d play together, he on the guitar, me on the piano. Things like Classical Gas, and The House of the Rising Sun.

I can’t play very well now, but I’m practicing. I got some music books, and have been working on two songs, chosen because they appeared to be fairly easy to play. Bob Dylan’s Blowin’ in the Wind and Simon and Garfunkel Bridge over Troubled Water. If I can master them, I feel like I’ll be well on the way to recovering my ability. I was pleasantly surprised to find out I can still pound them out pretty easily.

I gave him a good pair of binoculars. They are kind of a boat gift, he would love to have a nice 25’ to 30’ low profile cabin cruiser, with a berth, a galley, a head, outboards. I love that life, but know how much work it is. Though my boat was much bigger than that, so maybe the work would be manageable. To be gently rocked to sleep in a quiet anchorage, and wake up on the water, sip coffee in the cockpit, listen to the gulls, watch the fishing boats go out is a wonderful life. I can’t yet imagine how much more wonderful it would be with a guy who rarely gets upset, who can think a problem through. So now he has a pair of binoculars for that dream. Maybe it will manifest, who knows.

I’ve been thinking about the ocean, and how the perpetual motion of the sea is like the hearbeat of the world, carrying to all corners the emotion of life: loving gentle refreshing, playful, lapping the sand, and then building, growing, not dangerous yet, just purposeful. Then the adrenaline of a storm hits and the water crashes, carrying away the beach to deposit it later on some unknown unsuspecting shore. The fish are smart enough to go deep, where the water is always calm, but the things on the surface can be eaten by the sea when it is angry.

I’m a fair weather boater myself. I see no need to test my skill against the power of angry water, I have been in the trough, and looking up, seen nothing but water all around me, with a patch of sky in the middle. It was never my choice to be there at all, but my ex liked to exert his machismo and take a ride in it every once in awhile. It was my choice always to go back to safe harbor and wait another day, One time I told him we better turn back and he looked at me and said, “We can’t. I’ll roll the boat if I try to turn around.” The seas were too close together to have time to make the turn in between. So we fought across Nantucket shoals for about 4 hours, going 5 miles. The only other boat we saw was a US Coast Guard training ship a couple of miles off, a sailing ship. We made it to Martha’s Vineyard, and miraculously the water was flat calm there, and down the rest of Vineyard Sound, across Block Island Sound and back into Long Island Sound, where our slip lay. We were happy to be home from that ride.

In dreams water represents our emotions, and I have had more than a few dreams about the water. Some very weird, as dreams may be. When I can’t sleep, I often play white noise of waves crashing onshore. The rhythm puts me to sleep. Which I’m hoping it will do now.

Love and light to all…..