-

too wet to plow. hope you like to dance.

[rachel]

-

-

-

The other day I saw a picture of a baby girl, sitting on the coast on a blanket, clutching a doll to her stomach, staring out at the milky horizon, the churning waves. She looked so comtemplative, so self-contained. There was no one else in the picture, other than her siblings playing far off in the ocean, but I could tell the shot was taken by someone who loved her more than life, maybe a mother or an aunt.

-
I wonder why we begin as babies, why we don't just break out of the sand or the sea, fully formed, Venus rising from the ocean. Why we flail, bellow our frustrations, chortle our joy, why we spend a period of our lives mute and utterly dependent, but yet still ourselves, still the person we're going to be in our sixties.
-
I pictured this baby girl, her hands long and nimble, freckled with thousands of beach trips just like this first one, rolling out pie crusts on a counter, stabbing earrings through her lobes, cupping her palm against her husband's neck, swiping a paintbrush across a canvas, diving into a lake. Here she was. The beauty of it was none of us know what she is going to be.
-
May you grow like the ocean, sweet girl. May you have times where you crash forward, and times where you recede gracefully, come back into yourself. May you always buoy others up. May you keep some secrets locked away, may you be unexpected and wild, may you stretch as far as the eye can see. And may you guard someone else's beginning and end, the same way someone else guarded yours.