The storms come, no stopping them. They also pass.

The wind had been blowing since midnight, and the rain coming hard not down but sideways, off and on. Mostly on. I could see the ocean waves blowing back over themselves and sea and sky are both soft grays with a hint of green in the surf. Two and a half hours till high tide, but all the sand wet from the rain, and we did not get our morning walk. We got out the door for our three miles and had to turn straight back. We don’t mind a light shower, but this was a serious weather front. Storminess predicted to last without a break until Friday, which is not at all unusual for November. I used to count on a solid week of rain in this month—all day and all night without a break. But recently all bets are off. (The days in January of warm east winds and a burst of termites and carpenter ants drowned in the surf has not been predictable for years.) We average about 90” of rain a year—sometimes a mist or drizzle, in a storm sideways like a firehose, not usually coming “down,” and a hundred and fifty inches of rainfall isn’t unheard of. People new to the area are unprepared, friends naively suggest rain gear to walk the sand. Weather reporters in NW cities are alarmed by 45 mph gusts; we are accustomed to 65 mph. There is no rain gear that will keep you dry and safe in a full gale. Stay indoors!

This time of year we see a lot of dead seabirds during our walks. Mostly these are juveniles injured in the first storm, which was last week. This Tuesday, we saw four bald eagles—possibly our local couple and their offspring from this year. We saw no eagles when we first moved to the coast in 1979, but a nesting pair has successfully raised many eaglets, and perhaps these are even the same pair from the 1990s. Bald eagles, live, on average, twenty years but have been known to live thirty-eight.

We are partial to the black oystercatchers who sound like squeaky toys and will go to enormous length to lead us away from their nests. It is an unnecessary precaution given that their nests are inaccessible and most often thirty or forty feet up a sheer cliff. 

Seagulls were in the air, using the currents to stay high. Wind is safer than the shore. As this front passes, I expect to see a hundred resting at the creek north of us. 

Among the great advantages, as I see it, of being old, is having seen a lot, read a great deal, satisfied curiosity over and over. I lived the 1960s and 1970s, and I can assure others, for example, that Joan Didion’s view of the period is narrow and entitled. I Rallied and marched. I saw times change. My mother resented needing my dad’s signature to open a credit card, was further annoyed when it arrived made out in her husband’s name as a Mrs. Abortion was illegal when I was in high school. In some parts of the country so was any form of birth control. In many places, birth control was available only to married women. Thank Planned Parenthood for access. Women who accused abusers were treated worse than the pedophiles and rapists they identified. We can, in my grandmother’s, mothers, and my own lifetime, vote, sign contracts, testify in court, serve a local or regional or national political role, choose to have a child. Or not.

There are many divorces in my family, at least three in my grandparents’ generation, two in my parents, and my brother’s two. Women were often deserted in the past (probably my great aunt was) or ran away from bad marriages, and they mostly suffered financially. The great grand aunts who originally built the home we have lived in most of our lives, lived together. One was a professional women who offered the equivalent of an MBA over a hundred years ago. The other was a painter who kept a studio and didn’t do portraits. (Was she self-supporting? I have no idea. I have a few of her paintings, and they are not wonderful to me.) Another great grandmother kept a boarding house. It is a myth that women were sheltered “and given the best of everything… and ain’t I a woman?”

Things are better, and whiny men who are threatened by strong women need to own up to their own insecurity as a personal, rather than a cultural flaw. They want others to be weak so that they can pretend to be strong. Expecting others to be silent just because otherwise they can’t be loud is not strength. It’s petty.

The other more important advantage, for me, is trusting that bad times, however I might define “bad”, are not permanent. I am generally an optimistic, positive sort of person. At least, I have been told I am perceived that way. Obviously, anyone who reads my blog is aware I can go dark, that I suffer from periodic anxiety and depression. My husband and I are not-quite-joking about whose turn it is to be depressed. I was, to be candid, suicidal as a teenager. I was fascinated by mental health in those years and read everything I could about mental illness. 

The topic of mental health seems to be front and center lately. I briefly experimented with drugs in my youth—they proved neither cause nor solution. I didn’t drink at all, not even coffee or tea, until our sons were in school, but last month my husband and I quit drinking altogether. Only a few weeks so far, but it saves money, and money is a concern. I have never been in therapy, and the one time I reached out to ask for help, I received a response two or three years later. By then I’d long fought my way out of my sadness. I am aware of the arbitrary definitions of sad as opposed to depressed, though I’m inclined to think that these feelings constitute a continuum. When you can identify a reason for the sadness and can see your way past it, you will get there.

I had a bad day this past week. I was quite innocently asked about my writing process, which I then detailed. Was my original vision for the piece lost in the process over the years I worked? The process was the point, I think, but writing it out was discouraging. I sat afterward wondering. Gary brought me tea without me asking, and it passed, as sadness will.

Sadness passes. It’s true that overwhelming joy is fleeting, and I’ve never bought the reasoning that joy does not exist without sorrow. I think there can be a steady-state of contentment, interrupted by grief and lightened by relief. Joy is not a limited quality. Contentment is not delusion. We can admit defeats and disappointments, indulge sadness, and weep and wail without losing hope.

Tomorrow will come and things will change. For better or worse, so long…

That’s something I know for sure.