Today I took a walk by the Corte Madera Creek along the path I used to tread fairly regularly in the past. Not quite sunny and not raining yet, the weather was a perfect backdrop for my mood that has me neither in the clear nor in the mire of shadows.
While I walked, I watched the Marin junior rowers glide and halt then glide again along stretches of the creek, guided along the course by the coaches’ voices echoing across the water. Five years ago I used to be able to make out the shape of my own sons in those eights that sliced through water in all kinds of weather. It was hard not see them, my sons that is, as they were back then, out on the water and with their hands firmly gripping the oars and their future still wide open before them, like the bay into which the waters of the creek, along with the silt, are dragged by tides.
