knowing when to let go

NICE

/ janpriddyoregon / Leave a comment

They used to say, Nice guys finish last. We may want to rethink not-nice as a way of life. Right about now, the world could use a dose of niceness.

My brother said our mother was the epitome of “nice,” and that is true. Mom always tried to be nice and sometimes she went above and beyond to be kind to other people just because. She once followed a car that had dangerously cut her off and ended by holding the poor driver while they sobbed out their entire life tragedies on her shoulder. Gary is like that too. Saturdays in the 1970s we walked through every pawn shop on First Avenue in Seattle looking at guitars. Homeless men would tell him their life story and he would hand them change and sometimes they cried too because someone cared enough to hear them out.

That is my model for decent behavior. Treat others as you wish to be treated. Where have I heard that before?

There’s a bald eagle in the snag near the top of this photo, but she’s often there in the higher branches. We suspect her favorite perch is rotting and that’s why she’s taken the lower branch. Anyway, that’s not the reason for this photo. At the bottom, this photo shows the drift of sand in front of a shallow cave we pass most every morning on our beach walks. It looks like kids piled that sand up more than three feet high, doesn’t it? But this is what the tide did a few days ago. There are four sandbars running along our shore, five if I count the one that came up this spring nearly to the green line—more sand than we have seen in 40 years or so. The dune grass that was introduced to Gearharrt a few lifetime ago, was also introduced here but has not thrived the way Siberian blackberries, montbrecia, and English ivy have.
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