When you’re walking

When you’re walking Ogden Point breakwater at sundown, covered in yellow light, watching the silhouette of the Olympic Mountains sharpen under a near-full moon that’s climbing above the Dallas Road cliffs, holding hands with Deb, her palm cool on yours, and you pass a young couple fishing, a small lamp beaming between them as they cast their lines into a sea so still that the rigged spoons ring out as they clap the water; when a small dog bounces on the concrete walkway as she watches a great blue heron, full of patience and standing on an island of bull kelp studying a place just beneath the surface of the ink-green ocean, and when you approach the lighthouse at the end of the breakwater and see its orange flashes soaked up by the dusk, while a pilot boat pliés past toward a container ship to help steer it through the Strait of Juan de Fuca, and a girl with dyed deep-red hair, courting only quietude, glows down on the rocks while watching the far shore transform under a bruised peach sky, and at her back the moon runs its nickel ribbon along the salt water kissing every ripple on its way to meet the water in your own eyes…you can believe that all the world is without strife.

Watercolour by Virginia Brubaker