Not-Birthday

Since I bent your collective ear with about how sucky my birthday was, I wanted to let you know what a lovely not-birthday I had.

I had long-standing plans with friends to go to the coast at the end of last week (taking advantage of the boys’ spring break)—and even though I lost a day of it to the atypical chicken pox disaster, I sent the eight-year-old off with most of the gang Thursday morning, and followed with the four-year-old, and the working spouses (ie, the husbands) on Friday morning

And even though it was mid-afternoon by the time we rendezvoused with everyone else, we still decided to take the nifty little motorboat ferry out to the National Seashore barrier islands (Shackleford Banks, if you’ve been to that part of NC).

And it was a gorgeous, clear, spring day.

And we saw wild horses.*

And dolphins in the harbor.

And pelicans skimming the waves.

And the beach was deserted and pristine enough to remind me of my favorite poem about the ocean:

If you should dip your hand in,
your wrist would ache immediately,
your bones would begin to ache and your hand would burn
as if the water were a transmutation of fire
that feeds on stones and burns with a dark gray flame.
If you tasted it, it would first taste bitter,
then briny, then surely burn your tongue.
It is like what we imagine knowledge to be:
dark, salt, clear, moving, utterly free,
drawn from the cold hard mouth
of the world, derived from the rocky breasts
forever, flowing and drawn, and since
our knowledge is historical, flowing, and flown.
from Elizabeth Bishop, “At the Fishhouses”

And my friends made me an angel food cake with pudding sauce and berries, and everyone—five kids, five grown-ups—sang happy birthday.

So, I declared my real birthday null and void, and took that day for my birthday instead, because I’ve reached the age where you can do things like that if you want to.