She said it like it was something she was just now learning about herself.
The specific thing that knowing the ocean does to you.
The way it rearranges the scale of things.
I said: yes.
I said: he was right about that.
She said: how did he know?
I said: because he knew you.
She said: yes.
She said: sixty-one years. He had time to learn me.
She said it with complete peace.
The peace of someone who has been loved for sixty-one years by someone who took the time to learn them.
She reached down.
She unlaced one shoe.
She took it off.
She unlaced the other.
She took it off.
She said: is it all right if I go in?
I said: yes.
She said: I want to feel it.
I said: of course.
I rolled up her pant legs.
Not because she couldn’t do it.
Because I wanted to be useful.
I wanted to be part of this.
She walked forward.
The water came.
It came over her feet.
She made a sound.
Not a word.
The specific sound of someone receiving something cold and real and unexpected in its fullness.
She said: oh.
Just that.
Oh.
She stood in the edge of the ocean.
The Atlantic, doing what it had been doing for longer than anyone could comprehend, touched the feet of an eighty-six-year-old woman from North Carolina who had waited her whole life for it.
She said: it’s cold.
I said: yes.
She said: and it keeps coming.
I said: yes.
She said: it doesn’t stop.
I said: no.
She said: it just keeps.
She watched the waves come in.
She watched them pull back.
She watched them come in again.
She said: I want to stay like this for a minute.
I said: take as long as you want.
I stood beside her.
The water came over my feet too.
We stood in it together.
The two of us.
Grandmother and granddaughter.
The ocean doing what it always does.
After a while she said: that woman on the plane.
I said: yes.
She said: people her age shouldn’t be traveling.
I said: yes.
She said: imagine.
I said: I know.
She said: imagine saying that to someone.
I said: I know.
She said: imagine what kind of life produces that.
She said it without anger.
With the specific quality of someone who is genuinely considering the question.
