As a little girl I spent a great deal of weekends at my great grandmother's house and if anyone has had an external influence on my willingness to take risks and commitment to living boldly. it was and is she still. My adoptive mother told me when I was old enough to understand that it was her little cottage by the sea that I was taken to after I was officially adopted by "mom and dad" and they left the hospital with me. She was the first to hold me after the woman who would be the only mother I knew till my 34th year. Florence Jackson was a bold and vivacious woman who enjoyed driving her car till the age of 88, who had a special account for the trips she took to Lake Tahoe (where she never lost...amazing as that may seem), who taught me pinochle and rummy and black jack and how to sing the songs of the Andrew Sisters and Hank Williams. She made the lightest and fluffiest pancakes I have still ever tasted and she tried to get me to eat prunes and bananas with breakfast at the tender age of six and beyond. We watched the Lawrence Welk show together and the MacNeil Lehrer Report and the nightly Wall Street report and CBS for national news. She served fried chicken and perfectly lumpy mashed potatoes with gravy made from the leftover drippings after the chicken was fried shallow in a cast iron skillet. She let me wear my grandfather's dark blue golf sweater with patches on the elbows to the little beach framed with climbing rocks, literally a strong stone's throw across the yard and a hop and a skip and a jump across the road at the intersection of Pico and Sunset.
There at that little beach I would crouch close to the rocks, close to the rocks being diligently worn down to sand by the high tides of the night. And I would seek till I found a babyjar's volume of the finest and tiniest of shells that only the smallest sea creature could live in...for a little while. Back when I was young and my achilles tendon was long and lean enough that I could squat like a yogi in the sand and sift for the little pearls of petite shells.
The last time I visited that beach it was so much the same and so different. And I caught a glimpse of a little girl in a dark blue sweater with willowy legs standing tall and statuesque on a long and broad rock with her arms stretched wide in an embrace with the wind. For on that day, unbeknownst to me, my grandmother followed behind me, stopped at the road and captured on a polaroid me, greeting my beloved ocean in all it's fullness before I turned back to forage in the sands at the base of the rocks.
Oh and the tide pools of that beach...well that is another story for another day.
