I was reading an article about why older people need more friends and suggestions about how to find them (do something different, take up a hobby or join a club) when a woman we met on the beach a couple of times this week and chatted to, rang our garage doorbell and offered her contact information.

Life is wonderful that way sometimes. Full up with wonder.

She is from Germany and her last name is the same as the boy I crushed on in Eighth Grade. She is ten years younger than I am, an architect, and once worked for a few years in Portland. She has daughters and one of them is a doctor. I had told her about walking around Hug Point the other day, and while she’d been to this beach many times before, she’d never walked that far north before, but took our advice to try for low tide.

We sat for a while in the living room, Gary offered her coffee and showed her our magnificent bone Yeti and I found, and then she had to be on her way. She told us when we came to Germany, we should stay with her. We said the next time she came our way, she should stay with ut. “We have room.”

She promised to send me the photos she took of Gary and me. She said goodbyes were hard for her.

I imagine she had expected to meet us this morning on the beach, but I was too busy writing. My schedule shows a three-mile run on Wednesdays, which is what I did last week. Two miles on Friday, one mile on Sunday, two on Monday. I was supposed to run, but I was preoccupied. The day before, we walked long, I baked bread, worked on my loom, finished the newest Tana French novel, and sorted through family photos dating back to 1913. They are laid out approximately by decade on the diningroom table. Gary suggested three times that I put the leaves in to make enough room, but I stopped at the 1950s. (And that was only some of the photos. There are boxes. And boxes.) I had pulled out the boxes of family photos from my mother’s side, selected some early snaps of the beach, and made a pile. Mom never got around to sorting them properly. Some photos were in folders labeled something other than what was stacked inside. The folder labeled “Jan’s New House 1986” contained only her photos from the beginning of the remodel in 1984. It was Mom who walked through the structure once it was roofed but before the windows went in and suggested I should put more glass facing west. I pissed off the contractor when I insisted he reframe eight feet of that dormer, but then he was sometimes nasty when I asked for something, and preferred to do what he thought best, regardless of the plans he was supposed to be working from. We refer to the three-days-turned-to-three weeks-turned to six month as the “Big Mess” in our family. That’s another story.

sky fades to the sea
nearby crabbers circle north
white surf roars on shore

A friend posted that it was Haiku day yesterday so I wrote one.

For years I have avoided mention the name of my community here. We have lived in Arch Cape since 1979, my grandfather moved here full time in the 40s, and before that my mother and her entire extended family spent summers here beginning in 1911 when our beach was called Cannon Beach because ours is the beach where the first and later cannons were actually found. Many of my grandfather’s old photos of Arch Cape are marked “Cannon Beach, Ore.” on the back or on his negatives. The story I had was that when locals asked for a Post Office at “Cannon Beach”, the US Postal Service insisted we needed to name ourselves after a nearby physical landmark and came up with Arch Cape. The story about Cannon Beach Post Office was that the community was Elk Creek and asked to be Ecola after Ekola Creek (renamed Elk Creek, renamed again Ecola) at the north end of town and the Post Office named them Cannon Beach in 1922. Those stories about the Post Office are as likely fabrications as true.

I have my own experience with fabrications. Most of my paternal grandfather’s stories were fictions: the chimp tearing the sink off the wall, the horse rescued from becoming lion food. My dad warned me about that, though Daddy said he was present for a story his father never told about walking a cheetah on a cuff in Hollywood, and a terrier startling the cat so that it went up a palm tree, taking my grandfather with it. My grandfather was born in Essex and had an older brother, did work for Ringling Bros. Barnum & Bailey so the young tiger on the living room rug when my dad got home from school was true, and his mother (my great grandmother) is buried in an old cemetery on the southeast edge of Astoria. This is something of an odd coincidence since it is my mother’s side of the family that brought the Arch Cape home to me (and we have seen six generations in this house). Most of Mom’s family, back through those generations, was born in Oregon, though my mother was born in Oakland while her father was electrifying a hospital in the Bay area. Electrical engineering was a relatively new field in 1925. My grandfather didn’t study for his profession except in the field. That much is true. There’s more to that story too.

Among the early photos I found in flat boxes and envelopes are many of the original one and a half story summer house. The current house was rebuilt in the 1940s as a one story year around retirement home by my grandfather, Gordon Keays Smith. By then there was a road through Arch Cape, so my grandfather might have had his supplies trucked in on the road instead of driving on sand at low tide. He installed four by eight foot double pane windows of quarter-inch tinted glass on the west side. It’s likely he built them on site. Those huge windows are gone now, but five of the original windows remain in our house. The rest we replaced when we remodeled and regained the half second story, running the ridge east-west instead of north-south in order to preserve views for our neighbors. [Our various neighbors have never returned the favor; one man wrote to the county to forestall our plan to raise a roof by six inches, which would not have affected his view but would have improved our drainage. The local inspector warned me about that, “This is your lovely neighbor.” He said I could counter the man’s complaint, would certainly win, but it would take time I didn’t have then. That neighbor has never actually lived here, of course. His is one of the local rentals, and all things considered he is one of the better ones.]

In the mean time, I have been editing my novel again. My “obsessive revisioning.” Each day this month I have worked through part of a chapter or even an entire chapter each day, begun as early as three in the morning, and stopped as late as full dark. Some lines and entire paragraphs have been cut or rewritten, a long passage shifted to later in the same chapter, and a wonderful editor gave me necessary feedback about one character’s story. DAUGHTERS is 77k words, despite cutting more than a thousand words in one chapter alone—I know from experience this means I am close to as done as I can be on my own. It is a stronger narrative, I think. These feel to me to be substantial changes, but will probably seem minor to the editors pitching it to their team at a small press on Monday. I have let them know I have another draft. They have been enthusiastic about the work. Before sending them my last draft, they wrote: “Looking forward to reading the new draft. We’ve loved each one so far, and they just keep getting better.” At the very least, I have a better novel now that I did when these editors called it “wonderfully written” when they asked if it was still available earlier this year.

Fingers crossed.