Yesterday on our predawn walk north, Gary stood on a rock that usually rises above my head from the sand. This summer it is nearly covered. This is the deepest sand we have had in twenty years. In January of 1999, a storm-driven high tide dug the basalt from under the sand into a high ridge and took out far more sand than usual. It’s taken all this time to see it return.

Wasted. Not drunk or high, I’m talking about money.

Our biggest waste was “The Maples,” a piece of land just over two acres that my husband and I purchased in the early 80s when our firstborn was a baby. I have photos someplace of me holding him in my arms. Above us are the enormous bigleaf maples that inspired our name for the property. It was on the other side of the coast range, up the Nehalem Valley on a road called Anderson, and a stream ran along the north side. No houses I designed had yet been built, but I had great hopes for that property, purchased on contract from a widow.

And then the sale of our Seattle house fell through. What year was that? We’d accepted a very long escrow in return for a very large earnest deposit of $5000. That was in the fall. It was the following spring, early June, a week before the sale was supposed to close that the buyers told us they’d changed their mind. “No hurry” returning the earnest money.

And the money was spent on The Maples. We didn’t have it. We could not pay back the deposit, which was paid to guarantee that the buyers would not do what they did. Change their minds. I was pregnant with our second son, and we had counted on the sale closing in order to pay off the land because we really could not afford the house payments as well as the land payments.

And suddenly we were in trouble financially with contract payments on the acreage and mortgage payments on the Seattle house. Remodeling on the house I had inherited from my grandfather’s third wife. Renters had been turned out of the Seattle house, as the buyers requested, and there was some damage from the buyers opening walls and from the house lying empty for all those months. We had lost the rent and now had repairs to make before the house could be sold. Less than month before our second child was born, I was not in a position to drive back to Seattle and do the work myself. My Visa bill already did not bear thinking about. We had hard decisions to make.

We gave the land to the people who had bought the property next door, just gave it away. They would take over our payments and Tootie Anderson, from whom we purchased it, would not miss payments she relied upon, and we would be out from under one of those monthly payments we could not afford.

The Maples were gone.

Gary has a hunk of quartz crystals found at the base of one of those spectacular trees. Gary calls it our “thirteen thousand dollar rock.” That was what we lost in down payment and monthly payments on the property we gave away.

There have been other wastes. When I opened this page, I’d intended to talk about my husband’s dismay when he found that a coat he purchased a few years ago, an expensive cold-weather coat, was on sale for a quarter of what he’d paid. There are plenty of examples of wastefulness, wasted spending. Bad meals in restaurants. A pair of shoes I could not return after they gave me blisters. Fabric. A braided rug. Gary has bought CDs he realized he already had, or once had and did not like. Three incomplete sweaters that I will never finish. I have bought yarn I never used.

In our downsizing process, I let go of many projects I no longer wanted to work on. I sold a few hundred dollars worth of yarn for $90 and gave away my enameling kiln to a former student. I never heard from her afterward. Perhaps she didn’t like the yarn. I unearthed additional tools related to the kiln that I would like to give her. Perhaps the kiln did not work. Perhaps this is her own story of waste. sigh

But most of our “wasted time” was not wasted at all. It was lived. Dozens of stories and several novels consumed half a lifetime and that was not wasted time even though they are unpublished. But money. Money is not something we are supposed to talk about. For almost the whole of my life I worried about money, a habit encouraged by my mother who actually prided herself on being a “worrier.” It is a waste of time, I think.

A friend referred to travel by train as a waste of time. But on the one train trip I took as a girl, watching the countryside pass by was not a waste. Biking across a landscape is not a waste of time, running the Hood to Coast was not a waste of my time. Walking the beach this morning—we plan to walk south around the Cape—is time spent, not wasted. Time lived.

There is rain today, cooler temperatures began yesterday and I slept right through the lightening and thunder last night. Slept a good eight hours. Not a waste. Life.

This is also from our four-mile walk, looking south. Last year we could not walk between the Seal Rock and the headland—the gap above that is filled with sand. Last year it never filled in even by August and there were pools of water and barnacled rocks. This year that is all under feet of sand.