My Island

I opened the windows as I do every morning when I get up to look out upon a bright sun filled day.  The colors of the ocean are never the same. Sometimes they are deep blue, sometimes aqua marine (my favorite color) and at other times a line of purple just across the horizon. The ocean on occasion, dredges up forest green seaweed from its hidden floor, darkening the water that noisily hits the beach head. The white caps that roll across the shore vary in size and strength depending on how rough the surf is going to be on any given day.

I can feel the heat that the sand reflects with its yellowness and darker wetness as the waves wash up on the shore, leaving a scalloped design of varying lengths across the beach.  The dune buggies that ride from one end of the beach to the other to clean the litter left behind by yesterday’s visitors tire track the sand with a regular trail of ridges that are soon to be covered over by the shapes of different size footprints. How esthetically nice that it is cleaned every day and looks like a new wool carpet laid down on a huge living room floor.

Of course what I will see outside my window when I look up at the sky to check out the clouds becomes food for the imagination.  Life in the form of black birds that swoop up and down across my window always makes me fear that one will fly in through my open window and hurt itself with the ceiling fan or will not know how to fly out again to join the rest of its air borne buddies. Cotton candy, spread out across the sky leaving wispy trails in its wake or maybe fluffy balls of cotton twisted into different shapes like the ones I use to wipe off the day’s make-up on my face come to mind. If it should be later in the day the colors that provide a backdrop for the clouds are the ones that appear on an artists’ palette; chalk like pastels of blue, pink, violet, or a dusty orange.

Coconut palm trees dancing slow motion to the rhythm of the early evening breezes form a black silhouetted tracing across the sky too beautiful to describe in words, fully make me run for the camera or wish that I were really an artist so that I could capture it forever on canvas or on film to share the wonder of it with others. Could words written on a page whenever they are read serve the same purpose and convert me into an amateur poet making the scene come alive for others to appreciate? I would hope so and yet the choice to continue to make that creative effort is still mine.