Finding my sunshine on a gray winter’s day
/The Boston Globe
Beverly Beckham
It’s just weather, people say. What’s a little rain? What’s a little snow? You shouldn’t let it affect your mood.
But it does. It’s hard to be cheery on a gray winter’s day.
Think of it as silver, my granddaughter, Amy, says. Amy doesn’t need the sun to be happy. She is the sun. She’s away at college now, she left in September, but she continues to message uplifting sayings often written by anonymous someones to feed the world’s weary souls.
“If cauliflowers can become pizza, you, my friend, can do anything,” Amy messaged a few weeks ago. I laughed out loud at this one. It made me believe, for a minute anyway, that if I tried hard enough I might someday be able to understand Bitcoin.
Next, she sent this, which she bookended with small, red hearts. “When you can’t find the sunshine, be the sunshine.” And a few days later she messaged this, written in the 19th century by Oscar Wilde, giving it a weight that anonymous advice lacks: “With freedom, books, flowers and the moon, who could not be happy?” This gem arrived on a gray, ugly, January morning, another in a long string of gray, ugly, January mornings.
I have all these things, I thought. I have freedom, books, flowers, and the moon. So why am I not happy? Why, when I look out the window on a sunless winter’s day, do I not see what Amy sees, a sky, glistening like polished silver, a thing of beauty, but a sky, dull and monotonous as gunmetal gray. Because, I need the sun, not the moon, that’s why. Because I could live without the moon. The stars are enough for me. But life without the sun? Without its warmth? Without its light? Without sunshine?
I couldn’t.
But without sunshine, there is still the ocean. This is what dawned on me as I sat at my kitchen table thinking about Amy’s message. The sun makes me happy. But the ocean makes me happy, too. No matter the season. No matter if there are clouds. Because the ocean never changes. The sound, the smell, the taste of it. It ebbs and it flows. Even when clouds hang above it and alter its color, it roars on. It isn’t like the moon, showing a quarter of itself, then half itself, and only its whole self every 29 and a half days. It doesn’t play hide and seek the way the sun does. It is a constant. And I thought, I can get in my car, right now, in the dead of winter and drive to Hull and Nantasket Beach will be there, exactly where it was the last time I left it. Exactly where it has always been.
Which is what I did. I dressed myself in layers, scraped the ice off my car windows, and drove under a leaden sky to a place on this planet that has remained the same all of my life. Not the man-made part of Nantasket Beach. That has changed over the years. But what nature made, the sea, the sky, the sand. These are the same as they were when I walked this beach springs and falls and summers and winters ago. These are the same as when I walked this beach just a few months ago.
The sun never broke through the clouds that cold, January day. It was relentlessly gray. Gray sky. Gray water. Plus wind. It was an ugly day.
But it wasn’t ugly to me because I finally saw the silver that Amy sees everywhere. I saw the shimmer in the clouds as they floated by, low, thick, beautiful clouds, and the shine in the sea as it churned, and the sheen in the sand as we walked. Even the horizon glistened.
And I thought, this is where I have to take myself when the sun’s been gone for too long. The ocean is never gone. The ocean turns gray into silver. This is what I tell Amy. And this is what I have to remember.
