For over 30 years I spent a lot of time at the beach with my mom, laying on the warm sand for hours. As soon as we approached the bridge connecting the mainland to the island of Ocean City, New Jersey, even in winter, we rolled the windows down to deeply breathe in the salt air. Although we never owned a house there, it always felt like home.
Then a dozen years ago my mom died and I lost interest in all of it. It was too hard to be there without her. I decided that this part of my life was over. I wasn’t really even sad about it, I suppose it was rolled into the grief I felt from losing mom. It is something that now just is.
My vision loss occurred five months after mom’s death and it took many years after that before I felt up to traveling again. By then the airbnb industry was in full swing so instead of hotel rooms we began renting homes for a week, spending hours looking for the perfect place. If we were anywhere near a coast, I searched for something right on the water with a beautiful view.
Last year we returned to a property we had rented the year before as well. As I walked onto the back deck built right on the water’s edge upon our arrival, I realized that although the ocean at the Jersey shore no longer appeals to me, I still love being by the water, just in a different way. Where once I was on the lookout for jelly fish while I jumped waves in the Atlantic, I now love to watch ferries and seals pass by. Put me on a whale watch boat any day of the week or on the patio of our rental house on the banks of a cove in Maine, in a bedroom sleeping with the windows open, listening to the waves lap at the shore as the tide comes in and I am in my element.
Life’s events can change us. It is up to us to adapt to those alterations, something that can be very difficult to do. It takes work, made more challenging by our desire for things to be as they were, not as they are. Sometimes, there go by the grace of God and the grace we give ourselves, we find ways to bring a little of our old life with us. Take it from the blind girl, it is going to look different. But don’t worry, you will recognize yourself. Water is water and you are you.
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