Living My Life

At three years old, I gazed into the depths of space standing next to my father atop the Geophysical Institute in Fairbanks, AK and found a rainbow painted across the black canvas of night called the aurora. In this same year I traveled up the side of Mt. McKinley on his shoulders and met a black bear who was eating our supper at the campground. I watched sled dogs race across the snow and saw the bluebells bloom in the short spring.

Just a few short years later on the banks of the Missouri River in Nebraska we watched the sky fill with a sea of ducks and geese in their yearly migration. I climbed the mulberry tree where the “big boys” played and collected a posy of wood violets for my mother. Our class launched our kites and flew them in the March wind as we stood amongst the cows in the pasture behind the school.

We continued across America and arrived in Massachusetts where I watched the annual re-enactment of The Shot Heard Round the World on the green in Lexington. The autumnal display of red and gold leaves covered the hills all around and stole my breath with their beauty. The great nor’easter blizzard of 1978 covered the highway and trapped thousands of people in their cars for three days.

We made trips to the New Jersey Shore and I learned to swim in the sea and walked the boardwalk spending quarters on ski-ball. We ventured farther south to Virginia; climbed the Washington Monument and touched the moon rock in the Smithsonian Institute.

Years passed and I stood on the brink of adulthood. My friends and I sat on the beach in Salisbury, MA and watched the sun change the ocean and sky a million shades of purple and pink as it rose, after a night long discussion of life. A year later and I watched the ball of fire sink into the ocean off of Cape Cod as I sat next to my future husband on a three masted schooner.

A humpback whale played next to my boat and stared into my eyes. He understood, we come from the same place.

I’ve perched atop the Rocky Mountains gazing down on the planet below and I’ve walked through a desert valley listening to the hummingbirds dance among the scrub oaks. I’ve snorkeled off the Cayman Islands and wondered at the plethora of vivid life that lives under the sea. A butterfly the size of my hand sat on my head, and I giggled.

But all of this is observing the world we have been given. What about man’s ability to create? This too has been an abiding interest of mine.

I stood at the foot of the Statue of Liberty and looked upon her kind face. The St. Louis Arch astounded me with its glistening exterior and elegant design. In the depths of the Hoover Dam I marveled at the fortitude of mankind. Through the engine rooms of the Battleship Massachusetts I shook my head at the massive engines and then into the tin can confines of a WWII sub, where it amazed me that any man could tolerate those conditions.

I climbed on top of the pit road wall at a NASCAR event and felt the power of an unleashed race engine blow by. I stood at the nose of the SR70 Blackbird and smiled at its sleek ebony lines. A pair of B2 bombers turned on their afterburners and rumbled the earth beneath my feet with their power. I scrutinized the numbered tiles on the belly of the NASA Shuttle and touched the giant bell of a Saturn V rocket.

There is all this. Beauty in the world I live in and a different kind to be found in the productions of mankind. But it all returns to the beginning.

Two years ago my husband and I visited my parents in Maine on Thanksgiving Day. We drove to Bar Harbor and chose the Gorham Mountain trail. The day was clear and mild. Of course, the autumn color had long since passed, but the life of the rocks and ocean remain year round.

We stood atop the mountain and gazed out to the sea; four of us, a collection of miniscule organisms on the edge of eternity. We are at once alone but then knowing that through all the adventures of our separate lives, we stand together as one. Sharing the experience of life.