Yesterday morning I had a client who is preparing to sail around the world. We bought a boat, she told me. We sold our house and our belongings. What we couldn’t sell we gave away. And everything that was left over went to the dump. She told me how it felt to get rid of all of the things that made up her life on land. Most of it, she explained, was easy to let go of. Her furniture, her old yearbooks, heirlooms from long-dead relatives. She was amazed to find out how little she was attached to it all. We spend our entire life acquiring meaningless THINGS, she said. Even after we sold so much of it, and gave so much away, we still had to pay to throw away two and a half tons of THINGS. The one piece of her old life that she decided to keep was a hand-woven basket of her grandmother’s that was filled with hundreds of buttons. When she was a little girl she used to visit her grandmother and sit for hours playing with the buttons, thrusting her hands in the basket to feel them fill in the spaces between her fingers. I still like to play with those buttons sometimes. So that’s the only thing I kept.

I was fascinated by her stories of sailing with her husband. She told me that the ocean is a small town; if you run into a couple in Mexico, you’re likely to see them again in South America. They follow the same general route, leaving each place before the stormy season begins. She told me that if I ever wanted to travel, I would be able to make a nice living if I looked for the boat people. Hairstylists and diesel mechanics, she said. Those are the folks we need after being at sea for eight months.

There’s something deeply romantic about cutting ties with the land and becoming a nomad of the sea. At first it seems claustrophobic; I can’t imagine what it would be like to sleep every night in a cramped boat cabin curled between damp sheets, and to wake up every morning with nowhere to go but up on deck. But there’s more to it than that. If you live on a boat, the ocean is your backyard. You’re held only by the limits of your skill and imagination. The wind can take you anywhere. How different that is from the kind of life we’re taught to want.

Whatever it is that is important to you is what becomes your reality, she told me. Look around you. What you see is who you are.

There are toys spread out under my feet and half-finished art projects piled on the corner of my computer desk. There are plants struggling to survive in my kitchen windowsill and books filling every corner of my living room. There is blue sparkly toothpaste drying in globs on the bathroom counter and tumbleweeds of cat hair scuttling across the hardwood floor. This is a house full of meaningless things. But a stranger who walked into this house would see these things and know in an instant who I am. And there is meaning in that.

I’m not sure what’s going on, but there seems to be something wrong with my face. I am deep in the throes of one of the worst break-outs I have ever had and I don’t understand it. Nothing in my skin care regimen has changed, and although I am stressed beyond what seems humanly possible that is nothing new. The only thing I can think of is that things are just so damn awesome right now that perhaps this is not an acne issue, but rather some kind of happiness rash. Life is bliss at the moment, and I am bursting at the seams with joy and gratitude. Since I am, as a general rule, a bit of a quiet little mouse, maybe all of this happiness inside me needed to find a way out so it has begun to seep through my pores. Normally I would Freak the Hell Out over something like this, use it as an excuse to hermit myself away, but I am so pleased with life right now that I don’t even care.

There are so many good things happening, you guys! My job is amazing, I can’t even begin to describe how lucky I am. My best friend Pam started working there last week and one of our favorite things to do is stand in the dispensary folding towels, shaking our heads and wondering how the heck we got this deal. We basically get paid to hang out. It’s kind of ridiculous. I found some new ways to cut corners on my bills, which is a really boring thing to talk about so I will spare you the details, but part of it included purchasing a new phone today and this thing is so sleek and fancy that I don’t even know how to use it yet. And also, I spoke to my rental agent today who informed me that the owner has agreed to extend my lease another year, which means we don’t have to move in July and we get to stay in this beautiful little house where we have been so happy. Bliss! AND my lilacs are blooming which is wonderful because they are my favorite flower. They have exploded in my yard, and I have them overflowing in vases in the living room, filling my home with their sweet, bashful little scent. I am happy. I am grossly, sickeningly happy. Someone should really come over here and smack me or slash my tires or something, because I honestly don’t know how to function when everything is going well. Maybe that’s what this face thing is. Maybe it’s not a happiness rash, maybe it’s because my body is so confused at the sudden lack of weepy, angsty despair that it’s having trouble adjusting. All of my hormones and brain chemicals are experiencing an identity crisis.

Anne Lamott says there are only two true prayers: Help me, help me, help me, and Thank you, thank you, thank you. April was a help me month, but May is lovely. She is so darling and gracious and pretty, and I want to describe to you how wonderful I feel, but it’s all coming out garbled. All I can really say is thank you, thank you, thank you.

The first thing she does is dig a hole. She hasn’t even taken the time to remove her shoes, to dig her toes in the sand and feel the sandpaper grains scrape against the arch of her foot. Soon, however, I know the beach will be littered with her cast-off belongings: balled-up socks, dusty shoes, an inside-out jacket flung absently across a bleached log. Her focus is singular and as she digs a flush begins to bloom in her cheeks, the pink slowly spreading across the bridge of her nose and up to her temples where damp tendrils of hair spring into curls that stick to her forehead. The sand is in her eyebrows, in the hollow at the base of her throat, coating her forearms like a pair of silver opera gloves. She smells the way I remember smelling: salty and immediate and alive.

My grandparents watch from their nesting place on the patio wearing wide-brimmed hats and sunglasses. They cradle iced drinks as they sit and watch us, soft flesh spilling over the sides of their weather-cracked plastic chairs. Our surprise visit has unlocked something inside them and I can’t remember the last time I’ve seen them this happy. I float somewhere between the beach excavation project and the old couple, and I catch pieces of their conversation every now and then. They speak in tongues- the language of shared remembering. They laugh about the time they almost lost me in the water. They laugh about the time my uncles tried to row to the other side of the bay. They laugh at something funny my mother once said. They ask if I remember eating sand.

The hole is finished and my daughter has found a log that looks much too large for her to maneuver on her own, but I can see by the deep groove in the sand winding down the length of the beach that I’ve once again underestimated her strength. She pulls the log as close as she can to the edge of her hole and then drops it. It hits the sand with a muffled thud, one end jutting out over the opening. She upends it, holding it in place with wiry brown arms as she uses her feet to tamp the sand down around the edges. She lets go and it stays in place, taller and wider than she is. She nudges it with her foot and when it doesn’t move she looks over at me and tells me she is hungry.

Macaroni and cheese from a box, paper plates, green grapes. Grampa sneaks her handfuls of fat, moist jellybeans when he thinks I’m not looking. When I was little it was Hot Tamales, spicy little cinnamon bullets purchased in bulk at the grocery store. He would pop one in my mouth when my mother’s back was turned, the red-hotness of it exploding on my tongue like Independence Day, then give me some to hide in my pockets. I would find them at bedtime, sticky and coated with sand, and eat them in the secret darkness under my covers. In the morning, my fingertips would be stained pink and my lips would still be burning.

Outside, the air has done that thing I can never explain– the sudden switchover from daytime to evening that happens only when you’re not looking– and everything is sherbet-colored. Fishing boats have gathered on the flat, silver mirror of the bay, seeking halibut. A group of Japanese women trudge by carrying plastic grocery bags full of wide, black-green seaweed. They chatter quietly and brush sand off of the hems of each others’ pants. Gulls circle high above the water, white wings against a sky whose color I can’t begin to describe. It’s yellow and pink and hazy all at the same time, like Black Hills gold. I should start gathering up our things; if we don’t leave soon we’ll miss the ferry. But the earth is so quiet, the day fading like a slow exhalation, and I am drawn back down to the sand. I sit down and my daughter appears beside me. She burrows under my arm and we both watch in silence as the mountains on the other side of the water darken in front of the setting sun. After a few minutes she reaches down and picks up some sand with her thumb and forefinger. She rubs it between her pinched fingers until it’s gone, then picks up more and does it again. Listen, Mama, she says as her hands move. Scritch, scritch, scritch. Do you hear that? Scritch, scritch, scritch. My fingers are a cricket.

This quote is from the very first page of Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, by Jonathan Safran Foer:

“What about little microphones? What if everyone swallowed them, and they played the sounds of our hearts through little speakers, which could be in the pouches of our overalls? When you skateboarded down the street at night you could hear everyone’s heartbeat, and they could hear yours, sort of like sonar. One weird thing is, I wonder if everyone’s hearts would start to beat at the same time, like how women who live together have their menstrual periods at the same time, which I know about, but don’t really want to know about. That would be so weird, except that the place in the hospital where babies are born would sound like a crystal chandelier in a houseboat, because the babies wouldn’t have had time to match up their heartbeats yet. And at the finish line at the end of the New York City Marathon it would sound like war.”

I don’t think I have ever read anything so wonderful. This book is giving me goosebumps and shivers and little reader brain-gasms. It is perfection.