The Consolation of Water Lilies
Before I knew it, and long before the pond was ready for swimming,
they were gone. My daughter Linden chose to leave the little pond
and put her feet in the ocean at a redwood college far from home. I
went to visit her that first semester and we spent a lazy Sunday
afternoon admiring the rocks of the agate beach at Patrick’s Point.
Walking the shore, I spotted a smooth green pebble threaded
with carnelian, just like one I’d passed by a few steps earlier. I
walked back, searching the strand until I found it again. I reunited
the two pebbles, letting them lie together, shining wet in the sun
until the tide came back and pulled them apart, rolling their edges
smoother and their bodies smaller. The whole beach was like that
for me, a gallery of beautiful pebbles divided from each other and
from the shore. Linden’s way on the beach was different. She too
was rearranging, but her method was to place gray with black
basalt and pink beside a spruce green oval. Her eye was finding
new pairings; mine was searching out the old.
I had known it would happen from the first time I held her— from
that moment on, all her growing would be away from me. It is the