Yesterday's Tides

She was one small grain of sand squaring off against a hurricane. But each grain of sand played its part.

No more hidden pieces, buried in the sand. They need to be seen. How can we ever be understood, be truly loved, if we don't show all our most important pieces?

She couldn't change much about this life she'd been given, the yesterdays that dictated today and tomorrow. But she could do this. She could look at things in that way God had given her.

She'd do what she could to make life a little sweeter for the people around her. She'd live until she didn't anymore.

That's something every islander knows--there's always going to be another hurricane. Another storm. Everything buried will surface again, and everything you thought would last forever will come down eventually. But you rebuild. You dredge. You keep moving, keep adding new. That's how we go on living.

They’d become part of the earth. Part of the people. Part of the story they’d all tell. The yesterday whose tides would carve tomorrow.

That meant there was hope. Hope that a mother's love would pull a son back to her. Hope that the world would learn from its mistakes and build friendships where enmity had reigned. There was hop that someday this stitched-together family they'd claimed for themselves would be whole.

They would survive the devastation of this war, somehow. The scarred men, the abused women, the torn-apart land. They would all go on. All rebuild. All find new life. New life that might cover those scars but which couldn't obliterate them completely. She knew that too. They'd become part of the earth. Part of the people. Part of the story they'd all tell. The yesterday whose tides would carve tomorrow.

Stories had painted the backdrop of her world as a child, more than she had ever known. Stories had brought to life all the people who mattered to her, Stories had been reality in her family.

Just as Rem stood now by her side, never truly gone, so too would this wreck of a forest reclaim life. God had created it that way--to rebound from any ruin that man could wreak. To grow again. Thrive again. Cover over the scars with new life. That was what God's creation did, plant and animal and man.

She needed months, years, decades, centuries--or at the very least, however much of those God granted them. Together, though. Only, always together. Never apart again, they'd sworn that first night as they cried together over years and milestones lost, as they kissed away the thought of all those lonely days and nights, as they loved away the emptiness.

She'd lived a lot of years on this tiny little island, a dot in the Atlantic. Home to pirates, home to ships' captains, home to innkeepers and fishermen and Coasties. Home to generations of stubborn people determined to stand, though the sands may shift. To thrive, though the waters may rise. To go on living, though the storms may rage.

It could mean the end of everything. Everything. No more yesterdays remembered. No more todays walked through with determination. No more tomorrows to forge into something new.

Patience. That's what this glass and silver and shell had taught her over the years. Patience was what wore old broken bottles into bits of color and light. Patience what created those shells, wore them away again, tossed them onto the shore.... And patience had rewarded her here too.

Maybe there never was a winning team, not really. Not when war was tanks and guns and trenches instead of laughter and innocence.

Perhaps now that he was well he could joke and call her his jailer - but what she'd really been was his rescuer.

He'd grown accustomed to the yawning emptiness in his own life. Perhaps it always chafed like imagined sackcloth, but like sackcloth in the scriptures, he'd decided at some point in the last months that it ought to be a reminder to fall to his knees. Perhaps the cup given him wasn't happiness, but rather holiness. Perhaps he could do as a man of prayer all that he'd failed to do as a man of action.

Even when one was following God's illogical plans, things still went wrong.

That's the best way, I think, to handle what life throws at us. Grab hold of it. Make whatever we can with whatever pieces we have.