By Harry Cummins
When I was 7 years old, I lived with my mother in blissful Bird Rock By-the Sea.
My life then, the part I now choose to remember, consisted of collecting ladybugs in aerated canning jars filled with blades of grass. In the afternoons my mother and I would walk the short, steep hill cascading to the sea where she would sun herself on a smooth rock, her watchful eyes always fixed on me near the shoreline.
In the 73 years that have passed, my mother has died. Our clapboard beach cottage was sacrificed long ago to Southern California sprawl. I, in the name of becoming settled, have wandered from one address to another.
Reflecting on all this, from shores many times washed over, I can still trace where prevailing stability first began. Glancing back up the beach at my mother, my anchor, daydreaming on her rock, I could safely sense the rush of a wider world lapping at my tiny feet.
In those moments, then and now, life was simply everything I saw and imagined. I guessed the same was true for my mother there on her rock of refuge.
Bird Rock, it turned out, was a moveable fortress.
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