A dear friend is retiring in June. It will be an enormous change for him and a great loss for his employers—far greater than they appreciate, I suspect.

My husband and I have experienced our own great changes. Both of us are retired, though Gary teases me that I will never retire from teaching. The concern for students is too deeply rubbed into me. I still teach two college writing classes each year and hope to continue doing that.

Last summer—was it only then?—we drove the coast highway south in order to experience the complete solar eclipse. Gary had been alarmed by the reports of anticipated traffic jams and I was not willing to argue about it. We were going to stay home and see only the partial from home. We checked the ODOT highway 101 cameras that morning and the road looked clear so I suggested we drive for forty minutes or an hour, just to see how far we could get. We had each seen partials before. There was cloud cover and fog around Tillamook and south over the river valley. For a time we thought we might miss the event entirely, then further south I was able to look through my eclipse glasses at the sky when the sun was visible in a patch of blue. That little chip of darkness in the sun! We drove a few miles further into the zone before looking for a vantage point. There was a long line of cars on the shoulder and we pulled over behind a white car. One car pulled in after us. The couple waiting on the shoulder just in front of us had flown from Arizona to see it. They had stayed the night before in Cannon Beach, the closest they could get to the zone.

The Eclipse Chasers say the first time you see a total eclipse is life-changing. I am not sure how that is meant, but maybe so. Advice included taking photos and not taking shots, seeing the event with people. So many warnings about looking at the sun. I kept looking around at the maples behind us, the fields across the highway, horses in the distance. A field in the far distance being sprayed with water and shit from dairy cows.

We watched through our glasses and chatted with the Arizona couple. Gary named places the Arizona couple knew, and the bright sunlight dimmed. It was unsettling and amazing. Not only the sky which we watched through glasses till Totality but because there were light waves across the ground both before and after. They shimmered across the pavement, running north to south, like ripples in beach sand before and arrows after. The air chilled and I shivered. That cold was completely unexpected. Five bats flew out in the darkness and then vanished an instant later when the first direct light returned. This photograph was taken during totality, I shot others just as the sun came back and I was not looking. A flash of pink at the upper left edge is what I saw. I have seen that in the photographs of other viewers. Several shots I took during Totality show a white disk. I imagine someone could explain why.

It was still vivid in my memory days later. It is a moment I will remember. Perhaps that is enough to qualify as life-changing. There was the sense of existence beyond what I might have curled my awareness within and believed qualified as daily life.

Another event last summer changed our lives, a far more permanent event. Our dog, Yeti, died on the living room sofa. There had been several back-and-forth visits to the vet. She was unwell and only a few months past the age of twelve. We had always had dogs, since 1993. And cats too. And then last June we had no animal in the house. We are both reluctant to endure the death of another animal. I tell every dog I meet on the beach that he or she is a good dog. They all seem good to me. I think we are both lonesome for another being in our home.

We are each the oldest members of our family. We each have severely mentally ill family members. We walk the beach and collect trash—mostly plastic—most days. The people we greet on the beach are mostly close to our age. We go to bed too early, a habit of old people. We freely admit we are old.

My peculiar owl story is short-listed with a paying magazine. That means they have told me they like it and will perhaps publish it, but they have more stories they like than space for. I have been waiting almost three months for their final decision. It is the third magazine that has short-listed the story and kept it exclusively for months. This has happened before—a story editors like, but then eventually decide against.

In the mean time, I am receiving interest in the novel I first drafted in 2016. I worked so long on it yesterday that I was ready to go to bed by 7. Gary laughed at me since he is usually the one negotiating a bed time. He insisted I stay up till 8:30.

This novel, my fifth—how can that possibly be?—seemed done, but an agent asked me to revisit fifty pages. Those fifty pages led me to more chapters that needed work. And now I am working on the entire manuscript. There were issues in the chronology of the story, serious issue I failed to address until now. Two YA writers looked at earlier drafts with limited success, and an academic I absolutely trust was helpful and encouraging. This month I hope to share the manuscript with three other readers. My timeline, since I can work fast, is not short, but I have a great deal to accomplish.

And in the mean time? In the mean time we have spoken to a realtor about the value of our home. We were honest that we had made no decision to sell, but we are looking at options. Our sons and their families are in Portland. Medical care is not good locally. Most of the homes here are short term rentals—the house to the north, the one to the eats, and the one south is a bed and breakfast.

I wake too early and read too much of the news and fret about my students and what this world is coming to.

And yet, most every day, rain or merely cloudy, when the tide is low, we walk the shore.