I used to listen to the Talking Heads a lot in a former life- that song, “How Did I Get Here?” keeps popping into my mind. These days I veer more toward soulful music and ocean sounds. I am amazed at how each time I go down to the ocean, it is somehow different. Even from hour to hour, the sea may have shifted its mood. It’s my first time being an island girl, and in many ways it is like a rebirth. But, honestly, how did I get here?

My friend Heather found this house for us seven years ago, and I stepped foot in it once during those seven years. Now that I am here, I understand the magic that was underway that had this house in waiting for us until this time. Every day, several times, I think how I would not rather be anywhere else but this exact locale to continue my healing and learn to live with ever-present grief.

The ocean is both comforting and commiserating, often reflecting back my very own emotions. The relentlessness of nature and change is evident all around me, from the eagle eating the herons’ eggs in the rookery in our backyard trees, to the beautiful weeds and ferns that grow in our backyard, untameable and glorious, just as it should be. I have decided, based on the patterns of the sun and the wise gardeners and friends in my life, that the front yard will be my vegetable garden. I manifested eight long raised beds for a song at an estate sale last week, and the soil will soon be arriving as will my seedlings I ordered more than a month ago from local farmers. The backyard will be the wild garden, where chaos and creativity can reign. The front yard will provide the abundance.

Every day my back is sore from gardening and ocean walking. My core is becoming stronger from walking on stones and driftwood and sand, always shifting my weight, always needing to be aware of balance. None of it is easy, yet it is beautiful and gives me joy. I pray my irreparably damaged back will give me grace as I do all these things because I am committed to this life of being an island girl: walking, talking to Emily, gardening, talking to Emily, cooking, talking to Emily. Always talking to my Emily.

We find ourselves in a period of renewed grief. Perhaps it’s why I haven’t written much lately. In between moving, and slowly, ever so slowly, finding our way forward with what we need in the way of furniture and dishes and heat just as much as navigating grief in a new place and in a new phase – it’s felt overwhelming and purposeful and painful.

This has been my experience since Emily died. I am consistently given grace and glimpses of the that thin veil separating me from her, and then wracked with pain and sadness, the selfish kind. Of course, it is selfish. I think grief always is, at least in the way I believe. Emily is at peace; it is my task to find my own. Good selfish, of course. Good grief, as they say.

As much as I find myself in this paradise, this new life where every day I wake up asking, “How did I get here?”, asking for serendipity, which I am being given in spades, I would trade it all in a hot second for the chance to be physically with my Emily again, even if it meant sacrificing all of this.

So I find her in the wind and the ocean and the birds and the burgeoning back yard and that has to be enough. Some days it is and some days it absolutely isn’t. The path of grief never ends, I know this now. But I believe she brought us here because there is healing and magic in this place.