So Long Sweet Summer:

In many ways our magical summer is drawing to an end. Today ends my week of vacation: I start back to work tomorrow, and Sean starts graduate school on Wednesday. Neither of us are sad about these facts--we're both rather excited actually. I've missed the family I work for, and Sean is already reading his books for school. But we figured we should end summer on the right note, and so yesterday we took the 105 West, past the surprisingly smog-free skyline of Los Angeles, to Manhattan Beach. We took our beach umbrellas which we bought in Hawaii last January, and settled down to read in the sand at the edge of the Pacific.





I did read a lot, but I mostly feasted my eyes on all the beauty around me. The beaches of the South Bay are so beautiful because the coast wraps around both sides and lines them with purple hills and mountains. I read Annie Dillard, and watched the waves crash endlessly, watched the sun begin its slow, sparkling descent over the water, watched the children playing in the surf, watched the planes taking off from LAX and disappearing into the blueness of the sky. As the sun sank, the sky turned the color of a nectarine, and Sean and I sat together on his red dragon towel, cool but not cold in the chilly evening air. I remembered the last night we spent in Hawaii, watching Sean play in the waves of Waimea Bay while I sat in the sand and read The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion, and wondered how we can bear to love another person so much--a person who may be taken from us at any moment, but whose existence is so essential to our happiness.

It's a fragile world, and I suppose that's what makes it so beautiful.

Tonight Sean and I went for a walk at dusk in our neighborhood, walking slowly in the soft, gray light. Homes look so friendly at twilight, trees stand so elegantly with their silhouettes and shadows, and the moon shone like a newly minted dime in the depths of the watery sky.

The realization came over me tonight that if I don't create space in my life to see and wonder over beauty, it will pass me by--and, even worse, I will become blind to it.