Member-only story
My Beautiful Friend
I always seem to lose myself in a memory.
One memory leads to another, and then another.
Suddenly I seem to have relived a lifetime.
Thoughts of her always trigger those memories,
simple things that made us laugh, and smile.
Or some event that happened along life’s byways.
Too many, as it were, like this photo of this beautiful woman,
and indeed she was both inside and out.
A simple seashell in her hand.
To someone with a full life ahead of them
it might be a trivial thing.
To someone told to get her house in order,
a world of difference.
I can recall my first trip to the beach,
I collected every shell I could find.
It was in Huntington Beach, California in January of 1964.
The same stretch of beach that made the news
this last month over an oil spill.
Some large container ship that dropped her anchor,
but it didn’t hold and they drug it across a oil pipeline
and tore a large stretch of the pipe apart.
