House Near the Bay the Precarious Way

At the edge of the city sat a small house built of brambles and branches, mud and sweat, blood and hope, fear and longing. The marsh was a ways away and he thought the marsh was getting closer.

She called it an estuary and marveled in the creep and flow of the tides, up into the river and down spewing into the bay.

She would say “An estuary is a tidal inlet of the sea where the water of the Bay is joined with the freshwater of the river.”

That is how she talked, like a dictionary, full of facts and details and minutiae.

He would say “It’s a marsh ‘cause I get my boots stuck in it out back near the side of the house.”

She would nod and worry at her beads, one after the other, whisper, silent prayers on her lips. A strange mix of intelligence and religion she was. Always up early reading. The bible,  or the books she bought used when they went to the city, up the coast road, farmland sprawled on the right side and the rocky coast relentlessly pounded by waves and wind on the left. He knew he preferred the land side to the ocean side.

She said, “The ocean and the wind stir up the energy and make you feel your spirit unsettled. Wind waves are random and change all the time as a stochastic process. The pressure from the air is in direct relation to the pressure in your spirit and you sense the changes through the delicate ether.”

He had no idea if she knew what she was talking about but it sounded good, He thought she mixed Science fact with spiritual belief and came up with a worldview all her own. He knew he liked the land side, he knew he liked to be in the wind of the sea side, as the strong power off the ocean would almost hold him up while gusting. He could hear the eucalyptus trees groaning, sometimes with limbs breaking.

He would sit out at the edge of the front fence, just a ditch space away from the highway, in a little hollow that he had made from the juniper bush and a few select boards, and watch the ocean and the wind. Just watch, nothing more.

She would say “What is it that you do down there all day?”

“I sit and watch the patterns in the water and the air” he would answer

She had a habit of walking up the estuary, the marsh, early on into the morning gloaming, without a single thought to how much she could see or where she was going. She would walk up into the canyon until she came to a small place to squat down, she would sit for a long time listening to the land, the wind in the trees, the water flowing down to the sea.

He would say, “what do you do up there? I hope you don’t get lost.”

She would smile and tell him “Hush up, I find secret places to let myself rest in. I want to hear the voice of God, I want to be one with the land.”

The couple of them would go down to the beach and pick up stones and shells. They would be quiet at the setting sun and wait until it was almost dark, the other end of the morning gloaming, then they would walk back up across the highway and up the path into the glowing light of their small house that was built of love and hope, cedar and memory, a breath of tomorrow held aside for the night to enter into.