Hard Work
Wind off the ocean blew wet and cold, forcing Robyn to trudge along with her hood up and head down to keep warm. Most people thought of the beach as warm and welcoming. They had no experience with the shoreline on the Northcoast where rock formations jutted from the cold water and steep cliff faces topped by tenacious evergreens. Some beaches had a wider stretch of sand with ever-shifting dunes. As she walked, she scanned the shore, hoping last night’s storm had kicked up some good wood she could work in her shop.
So far, the offerings were beautiful pieces but either much too big or small and splintered. She had found a manageable chunk that wasn’t the redwood or madrone that typically washed up. Based on ocean currents it was likely lumber lost from a Japanese freighter. She looked forward to getting it back to her shop to clean it up and determine whether it was mahogany.
She walked the full length of Clam Beach, stopping at a huge redwood stump she’d had her eye on for some time. She rubbed her gloved hand across it. Even with more of the stump freed by the latest storm, she knew that she could not roll it without help, and she had no one to ask. It would have to be cut into pieces to work it, and she’d hate to make the choice of how to cut it up out on the beach before she could get a look at it from all sides.
Hard Work.
The stone she’d warmed in her palm that morning had given her a good feeling for the day, but this work was beyond her. Maybe if she hitched it to a horse. She turned and scanned the beach. A few walkers stayed close to the waves on the more firmly-packed sand. There were no horses on the beach today. Not like the one she had seen galloping effortlessly along the shore months before which had reminded her of her childhood promise to herself. It had prompted her to visit the bulletin board at the barn she frequented for manure for her compost, to look for a horse to lease.
She’d been in the fourth grade when she convinced her parents to let her take riding lessons. Saturdays, they would drop her at the barn in the morning, and she’d spend the entire day with her beloved animals. Most of the riders at the barn were around the same age, and they all laughed at the old ladies.
Old. Robyn laughed at herself. More than a few years into her forties, many of the women she remembered were probably years younger. She saw herself in them now when she brushed down Taj, returning to riding after too many years away. As a youngster, she had promised herself that she would always have a horse. She would never lose sight of something that grounded her so well.
Yet she’d sold her childhood horse when she went away to college and forgot all about riding while she served in the coast guard. No horses at sea. But then she’d seen the horse and rider on the beach and remembered the unbridled joy she had felt at that breakneck gallop, as if she could outrun any problem.
Could Taj help her outrun the problem she found herself in now? She twisted the band on her left ring finger, wondering what Barb thought of when she looked at its mate on her hand. Two female figures curved, arms above their heads to grasp a garnet. Barb had found them at the North Country Fair, and they were perfect.
They had been for eight years. Most of those years…Some of them? She was so tired of living unhappily ever after. When had being with Barb become such hard work? More importantly, when had she begun to look at it as work she was not capable of handling?
She looked out to the horizon where gray met gray, the line between water and air obscured by the low-hanging clouds and mist. Her answer was not out here in the cold. It wasn’t in the warmth of the barn either. Taj helped with her friendly nicker and the way she butted at her pockets for hidden carrots. The mare had raised her spirits considerably, but now she could see how far she had fallen. The cold gray had never affected her. It had always felt invigorating, inviting hard work to warm her.
But lately it had invited the darkest of solutions into her thoughts. It would be so easy to crawl away from the cold and just sleep, sleep past all the fights and worse, the silence that hung about them.
She looked back at the stump. Something beautiful waited to be born from it, but it was going to take a hell of a lot of work.
But not today. She slung her adz over her shoulder. On some large hunks of wood she used the ax-like blade to clean sandy grit away so she could saw the wood into manageable pieces to carry off the beach. With this stump, she couldn’t see enough of it to know where to start. “Don’t go anywhere,” she said, rubbing the sandy surface again. “I’ll figure out a way to get you home.”
Speaking to a piece of wood throughout the process of finding it through finishing it wasn’t unusual for her. But these words brought her pause realizing that she was trying to figure out a way to get herself back home too.