Watching the tide roll away

Well marked path

In the spring of 1985, Dottie Erbaugh was laying in her bed upstairs in her house in Dayton, Virginia, dying of breast cancer. She was 32 years old. Outside, her husband was playing football with the 3 kids they had adopted. Dottie was one of my friends from church and everyone who knew her had funny stories to tell about something she did. She was one of those people who was the life of the party and made a party happen if there had not been one before. I had signed up with the home health agency that was taking care of the medications and personal care Dottie needed. It made me feel useful and gave me an excuse to spend several hours a day with her. The cancer had entered her bones and she could not move by herself.

That day, I think I asked Dottie something like, “Where in the world would you be if you could be anywhere right now?”  She looked longingly at the door to her room. She said,” What I want to do right now is go downstairs and stand at my kitchen sink and peel potatoes and watch Larry and the kids from the window.” Several weeks later Dottie was gone.

Needless to say, I have never looked at peeling potatoes in the same way. This morning I was on my hands and knees wiping up the RV floor.  I was thinking about this blog and how my readers must be tired of us talking about biking and hiking and would probably not be interested in hearing about the more mundane tasks we do like wiping floors, doing dishes, and folding laundry, and scrubbing dead bugs off the huge RV windshield. And then, like every time the word “mundane” comes to mind, I thought of my friend Dottie.

It is good to remember that nothing we do is mundane. Every day is a gift. Every day we discover that this world has a lot of really beautiful places and beautiful, kind people. One day we hiked to a lighthouse. We hike one day and bike the next.

Looking back at Sand Beach

Another path in Acadia

Hiking on Schoodia Island

Coastal view

What I will carry with me in my memories of Acadia National Park are the pictures in my mind of the dappled sunlight coming through the trees leaving patterns of shadow and light on the paths of pine needles and leaves and rocks and gravel. I will remember the sparkle of the vast blue ocean and how it crashes against the huge rock cliffs over and over. I will also remember flying downhill on our bikes on the carriage roads with exhilaration and being so exhausted going up long hills that I have to walk the bike. And that some days I was walking like an old lady by the time we arrived back at the RV.

One day we walked in Bar Harbor and walked over a “bar” of land that is only available to walk on about 3 hours per day surrounding low tide. We walked across the sand and rocks marveling that in in 4 hours that very spot would be covered with water and get as deep as 6-10 feet. On the small island we climbed rocky paths to see Bar Harbor from across the water. Then we headed back wanting to have no doubt we would not be stranded there. There was a sign on the island that said that if you got stranded there you could call for a water taxi or you could wait 9 hours until the low tide was back -yikes. 

The Bar to Bar Island at Low Tide

Watching people and boats come and go. They were loading the schooner for a tour.

In Bar Harbor we found a large gazebo on a green hill and sat and watched boats come and go and watched the tide come in and cover the bar. Tides are amazing to think about and understand. In Europe and here in the U.S. there are two low and two tides per day but there are places in the world that have only one high and one low tide per day. The range of how far they come in on this side of the U.S. increases as one goes north. Where in Virginia, the tide may come in 2-3 feet, here in Maine the tide will come up as high as 12 feet. The Bay of Fundy in Nova Scotia has the highest tides in the world- as much as 53 feet. The height of the tide has to do with the size of the continental shelves- the parts of the continent that stretch out under the ocean. I do not totally understand it but we have not tired of just “sitting on the dock of the bay watching the tide roll away”.

This tree had a hard life

This one adjusted its attitude and reached for the sun

Ferns growing out of rocks

The temperature is dropping in Maine and after a couple of weeks of temperatures in the 70’s the highs are now in the low 60’s. Our electric fireplace takes the chill off of the mornings and another blanket feels good at night. The leaves are just starting to turn here and it must be an awesome sight when they are at their color peak. But we are wanting to spend October in Virginia with friends and family and so we will head south.

In North Carolina there are thousands of people who have lost so much in the flooding from the hurricane,  in Virginia there is a friend who is recuperating from a broken hip, in the Phillippines there were hundreds of lives lost from the recent typhoon in the Philippines, in Haiti the decreasing value of the goude will increase deaths from starvation and lack of medicine.  There is nothing mundane about anything we are blessed to do in each day.

More pictures from beautiful Acadia National Park-