Sunlight. Breezes. Silence.

One time, years ago, I woke up early on a golden morning, before the sun rose, and I got in my car and drove down to Galveston. I don’t remember now why I wasn’t working — it was a week day — but once I got past the noise and traffic streaming into Houston, it was a quiet drive. I crossed the bridge onto Galveston Island when the sun was barely up. Shrimp boats were heading out into the Gulf to begin their day’s work and, off in the channel toward the Boliver Point coast, there were dolphins leaping in the waves.

I drove down Broadway, as I always did, past the Bishop’s Palace and all the little streets lined with pin oaks and palm trees. I loved the little side streets in Galveston where the cottages were shuttered against the night and the palmetto branches clicked and clattered in the morning breezes.

The Hotel Galvez was open and serving breakfast on the veranda. At that time the veranda of the Hotel Galvez was my favorite place in t world. On afternoons when my friends and I would be returning from the beach, we would gather there, sunburnt and salty, and drink sangria in the breezes blowing up from the Gulf.

So on that morning I went to the Galvez. There were very few people there and I sat alone at a table overlooking the water. I don’t remember what I ordered. Coffee, probably, and one of those rolls they served that were sticky and cinnamony but not too sweet. And fruit. They always had platters of fruit. I remember that I sat there for a very long time, not writing, not talking, just sipping coffee and watching the waves roll in. It was an extraordinary experience because it was such a quiet one.

There’s no real purpose to this story except to say that it was a defining moment in my life. I was only 30 then but thought at the time that I was very mature and thoroughly grown. But something happened to me on that morning. I had left my family and friends 1500 miles behind in Pennsylvania and moved to Houston where I had a couple casual acquaintances but that was all. I was completely alone and I had risen early and driven to Galveston to sit on the veranda of the Galvez and drink coffee and watch the sun rise over the Gulf of Mexico. I remember how that felt but it is a feeling I have never been able to capture and describe. I have tried.

Today is a day like that — brilliant sunshine, curtains billowing in the breeze — albeit a breeze a good 30 degrees cooler than the one in Galveston. I can smell that delicious, salty, oceanic fragrance blowing up from the harbor and, so far, the day has been quiet. My coffee is ready. There is a thing that happens inside of me on mornings like this that so far I have never been able to capture in words. It is a delicious, subtle, mysterious sense of possibility mingled with an ancient yearning, the roots of which I cannot place.

I have shared mornings like this with lovers and with friends and that is wonderful, too. But experiencing them alone is sublime. I wish I had a better ability to explain that. All I can say is that whenever this happens. When I wake up aware of the sunlight and the sea breezes and the scent of the ocean, I remember that once I was a girl who traveled across half a continent alone. That once I let myself rise early and drive to a place I love and just be there in complete stillness and complete joy and begin the day.

I keep waiting for an understanding of what that feeling is and, in 25 years, words have always failed me. But the memory has stayed sweet.

Thanks for reading.