Speaking for myself...

I came home from the Hummel Family Reunion on Lopez Island with a rock and a piece of algae.  The rock is one I picked out of Hummel Lake, to remember the joy of all of us standing barefoot in the shallows together.  The algae is from the water outside the home we rented.

Each morning I went outside to a white wooden bench beside the shore.  I went there to read, and like clockwork, it didn't take long until my eyes turned to the algae.  It was a brilliant green, especially during low tide, and shifted shades depending on the amount of fog and the time of day.

It looked like a loosely woven shawl, draped over the rocks, providing a walking surface for the birds and a covering for the fish swimming underneath.  At the risk of irreversibly altering the ecosystem, I took a six inch square piece up to house.  I thought I could preserve the memory of the delicate green water shawl I'd grown so fascinated with.  My sister-in-law and I decided that the preservative of choice was hairspray. Extra-extra-hold hairspray.  I sprayed on one coat.  Then another.  Then another.  And so it continued as the days went by.

It looked for a while like I had a successful science project.  But soon it became clear that the green had started to slip past its laquer protective coating.  I don't know how the green was able to manage its escape, and I don't know where it went.  I suppose I could google something about chlorophyll but I don't really want to know.

Well, after comparing "my" algae with the algae outside, it was obvious that this isn't something that I could possess.  It was something to be appreciated in its own lush context.  But out of context, it lost what made it beautiful to begin with.

Isn't that just like material things?  That which makes them remarkable and extraordinary is the "green" - the life they have in them.  The green that absorbs the light shining down on it and miraculously turns that light into energy, into growth.  And all the extra-extra-hold spray in the world isn't going to be able to contain it.

Within the last week, I essentially gave up ownership of my mom and dad's house on the cliff at Crescent Bay in Laguna Beach.  I think my parents both thought that after they died, somehow their kids could preserve the "green."  But no.  Speaking for myself only, the green went out of that place faster than out of my piece of algae.

I don't know where the green from my algae went.  But I know absolutely that when the green from my parents' home left the building, a part of it found its way into every cell of my being.  It's the life, the warmth, the welcoming, the spirit, the laughs, the love that fill me to overflowing each and every minute.

When my dad passed away, my uncle Dick said, "The inheritance has already been distributed."  Whatever was important about my mom and dad is already mine.  The inheritance isn't in a house or in the stuff inside the house.  It's in the life we shared together.  And now that a portion of the green is in me, is a part of me, I have to find my own way with it.  It will certainly emerge as something different than that of my parents.  It will take its own shape and color.  Like the algae on Lopez, it will support the birds or whatever needs its support .  And it will cover the fish or whatever needs its protection.  And it will, of course, be a beautiful, beautiful thing to watch from a white bench on the shoreline.