MY PERFECT DAY            

To understand what makes a perfect day for me you should understand that a fundamental part of me has to do with water.  Sure, water makes up about 75% of my body, I’m as sloshy as anyone else, but running a close second is how I feel about water.  I love to be around it, on it, in it.

Even though I am of that generation whose parents believed girls should get swimming lessons and boys should be thrown into the deep end and “tough it out”, I was always the last kid out of the water, skinny, shivering and blue.  I think you get it, I’m a waterbaby.

As are we all, as we are reminded by Agnes Baker Pilgrim –

One day in early October, one day of perfect weather, one day of crystal clear water, one day that makes up my perfect day.  One day that made me think of perfect days, how lucky I was to 

 experience them and to leave me to wonder how many perfect days are left.

 I bought a used kayak some time ago (I know, I know it’s pretty silly that I have to have a “backup” kayak, but getting caught without one is dangerous to my health.) and have used it frequently in a lake, but I had yet to get it into salt water.  

 

It was one of those glorious days that seem to happen more and more lately, an incredibly beautiful, warm day at the wrong time of year.  What could I do, but play hooky, call a friend and head to the beach with two boats strapped to my little car?

What the maps call Puget Sound, we who live here are call— The Salish Sea.  The Salish Sea that day was very calm, not smooth as glass with all the dead calm that implies, but calm with tiny rollers that lifted your boat just enough to remind you that water supports us all.  So clear was the water that day, you could not only see the bottom out to twenty or thirty feet deep, but you could also see the nutrient stream that runs with the current parallel to shore.

And, in that eternally moving stream, jellyfish float taking it all in.

With the Olympic Mountains to one side, the Cascades and Ti ‘Swaq (AKA Mt. Rainier) spiffy in dark blue and pure white on the other, I sit on the peaceful water full of bliss and wonder.

Which was quite a change from that morning.  I read for a little while each morning.  It doesn’t matter what I read as long as I hold still until the cat in my lap has deemed the day started and I am allowed to move again.

That morning I was reading Wired magazine and staring at horrendous photos of thousands of shark fins drying in a Chinese warehouse waiting to be made into soup.  The fact that the fins are taken from the sharks and that they are then dumped back into the sea— was not the most horrifying thing in the article.

What shocked me the most was, “… the man-made causes behind what biologists call the sixth mass extinction— The spate of plant and animal losses that threatens to eradicate up to half of all living species on Earth within this century.”

And, that’s the thought that interrupted my perfect kayak paddle on that perfect day.  Half of everything living gone by the time the odometer rolls up to 3000 C.E.  I won’t make it that long, but I have friends and relatives with kids that might live as long as that.  What a heartbreak of a world we are handing over.

 

 

It makes me wonder how many perfect days are left to us.