Season of Magical Creatures

I cannot believe the beautiful Fall we have been having here in the PNW. Even more than that, I can’t believe Paul isn’t here to revel in his favorite season. I don’t remember colors like this in our 8 years in the PNW, and I certainly don’t remember having an entire week of sunny and crisp weather in October. It would be so much more fun to have him here to enjoy it.

This is the season that I like most for swimming – the water is crystal clear and has deep blue-green tones, the plant life at the bottom is still hanging on, and the colors of the deciduous trees make a satisfying contrast both along the shore and in the water where the fallen leaves wind up. I think Paul liked the Fall because it meant ski season was coming, mountain bike season was getting more fun, and he loved pumpkin pie. Emmet loves this season because green figs drop from the sky and that is the most fun thing in the world, ever.

This September and October has been a time of magical creature sightings for me, and I hope that is a trend that continues. Did you know that seahorses exist? Like, they actually live in the wild and haven’t been designed by humans to place in aquarium tanks to fascinate us? I had my doubts. But on a recent trip to see my college friends out on the East Coast in Manasquan, NJ, I was lucky enough to cross paths with on in its natural habitat! Okay, I made pretty sure my path would cross his. It was heavy flirtation.

I don’t think people come back after dying and visit us as other creatures. Although that would be really nice, and I wish I did. But I have been more in tune lately with the world around me as I spend more time in it alone. Getting up for sunrise and floating around in boundless salt water and seeing colors that I can’t believe, even though I saw them the day before; seeing a creature I didn’t think really existed; watching my dog be a goofball – these are times that I am less hung up on the repeating and body-stabbing memory of watching Paul die and I feel a little more okay. I know he would have been as amazed or as amused by these things as I am.

Last night, I joined a friend and paddled out in the dark on a prone board to find a whale. There have been a few humpbacks hanging out between Tacoma and Vashon for the past week, and Dean thought we would have a good chance of hearing them at night when the water was flat and the wind was nonexistent, and the boats that had been harassing the whales all day had gone.

It was such a multi-sensory treat. It smelled like Fall and wood-burning fires, yet we were out on the salt water. The moon was a little more than half full, the stars were visible, the water was glass. We could hear herons flying over, saw a bat or two, and I even saw a shooting star. Not the flash of one in my peripheral vision that I am used to, but a long and bright one right in front of me, that went out like a match.

In all that quiet, we heard the whales. We think there were two; one sounded like it was up in Colvos passage just West of the Southern end of Vashon. The other one, with a deeper and longer exhale, was much closer to us and just off the end of Point Defiance Park. I felt like I had been transported to another world for that hour and a half, just listening to those sounds and lying flat on top of the sea.