08.23.2007 - 6:05 p.m.

After work today, I should have gone straight home for a nap. Instead, I turned south, past the cornfields and soybean fields, past the slat-sided tobacco barns and tiny white churches, past where the road dwindled to a winding, shoulderless way past dirt turnoffs named for the families who still owned the farmhouses at the ends of them. I did not stop until I had dropped three bucks into an honor box to enter the state park; I did not stop until I ran out of land.

I parked and, leaving my shoes behind in the car, walked across the little grassy swatch between the lot and the jetty. I clambered up onto the rocks, hot and treacherous beneath the pads of my feet, and out to the very edge, where the stone was dark with tides and critters. I perched on the last large rock between Maryland and Virginia, barely visible in the haze across the way.

I was in the mood for waves, for wind in my hair, but the water was undulating glass. I wanted crash and flow, but the air was still and soundless over the faint knock and ripple in the nooks and crannies of the rock, the skies empty except for the occasional lonely seagull.

I�d gone down there because I�d wanted the tides to tell me something. I�d wanted to lose myself in the ebb and flow of things, to see what the two rivers joining there would wash out of me. They were having none of me, though. Water moves at its own pace, in its own way. In my haste to clear my head, I had forgotten.

But it always moves. And in time, it�ll tell me what I need to know.

-stonebridge

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