Susan Senator

So happy today. Everything moved forward and curled around us like a ribbon on a present. We rode our bikes 20 miles, eating breakfast in the middle. But it was later on, almost 4 o’clock, when we discovered a new thing in something very old. We thought we’d seen the whole Outer Cape thing—Ptown, bike path, Nauset Light, Wellfleet Harbor—and yet there it was, as never before. It’s a river leading into the bay. A woman told us about it; neither of us remember who she was. “At the end of the parking lot, the very end.” We couldn’t park yesterday but we could today—thank you Labor Day—and as we walked towards the pale green grasses we could see blue plastic footpaths leading towards water. The water cut through the marshgrass and widened out, lapping at the edges of a white sand beach. We walked the whole way around and saw it, the river, flowing around a gentle bend of beach, beyond which was the bay.

“Where do you suppose is the dividing line, the exact spot where river becomes bay?” I asked, knowing there was no real answer. Still, I walked all the way to that area and I could see a line of tiny dollhouse waves spilling over into a current. This must be the spot!

I walked through it, surprised by the strength of it, like the insistent, pulling hands of a toddler. I met up with Ned who told me to use his goggles and watch the sand fly by underneath us as the current pulled us along. “It’s like flying,” Ned said and I caught a flicker of his deep happiness, having found, at last, what he’d had so easily in dreams.  Then we held hands and we flew together upstream. “I’m Superman,” he said.

After, he floated/flew up and down while I walked against the surprisingly strong current. I moved at a diagonal from the beach, into the bay, my arms spread out from my sides, hands dragging in the water. Everything around me was golden: the sand, the sunlight, the millions of reflections of the sun on the tiny waves. My body felt strong, my eyes felt happy, my mouth smiled. My old love and I had found a new place to play.