It feels like I’m hungover today on my morning walk through the neighborhood.

The fog has settled in, it hovers and hides what is in the street right in front of me.

The election placards on peoples’ lawns are limp and dripping from the rain. I can’t stand to look at them.

A bicyclist passes me and it makes me think of being 10, flying though the streets of my hometown, without much of a care. Is that when all of this started? When I let my hands off of the handlebars?

When I took for granted that things would go well. That government was good and democracy was forever.

I still want to believe that all of us in this country want similar things – clean water, good schools, enough resources for everyone.

But somewhere along the way, I stopped paying attention. Maybe I hadn’t noticed that the Dream wasn’t really big enough to include everyone.

And how we’ve been more divided than apart.

My generation was the Reagan years, full of the gluttony of consumerism and gross military might. We were selfish and we took too much.

And now what do we have to offer our own kids – no affordable housing, an insecure job market, negligent healthcare.

I paint things simply.

But last night, having dinner with friends, it was like a solemn wake, only one without a body. And what were we mourning? And to whom could we offer our condolences?

And now, this afternoon, my grandson is teaching me to be a bird. At the park, on the swing-set, he wants me to push him higher and higher, like he has wings – soaring to the top of the sky.

And with his chubby arms extended. He says “cheep-cheep”. And he says, “Look how high” and “birdie is so high in the sky”.

Over and over.

He laughs and I want him to feel like this forever.

A bright baby bird, with auburn hair flying – fragile, but brave.

I’m free, he says.

I’m free.

I stoop to retrieve the small pink shell from the frilly edge of the surf. Upon rinsing, I see that it is perfect, without flaws.

Years of being scraped along the ocean floor, tossed upon the waves, it comes to me as a delicate bit of ephemera.

Late afternoon, I walk up to the beach house, dusting the sand from the shell inside my pocket. Such a delicate thing, yet, further away from the beach, it takes on a different weight in my palm.

And days later, at my kitchen sink, I display it. And days after that, the reality of the actual treasure starts to fade from my mind.

Treasured memories of my son sleeping under the umbrella, my husband stretched out with a book. My grandson shrieking in the waves with his mommy.

In some way the shell is more real to me than those remembrances. The shell is like a bone from an animal unknown, dead but substantial.

Last weekend, I placed the little shell inside my cardboard shrine on Dia de Muertos. I arranged it on my simple altar that I set up every year to honor my mom, who died in 2013.

I placed it next to some flowers, a glass of wine, several old photos, and a ring she’d given me. And I drank the glass with her and I gazed at her beautiful face, and I tried to remember.

And I reached to sift through my mind, to find connections among the items. I touched the relics.

I remembered her at the beach, how she hated the water, until we made her go out with us. She would always thank us for “making” her get in.

Her deep brown skin. Her flowered bathing cap.

The gift of freedom she allowed us – never fretting for our safety.

How strange that her body is gone, and that I can’t hold it like an insignificant shell tossed and tumbled across the sea floor.

And today it feels like the sand is shifting through my fingers and nothing seems permanent. But for the glow from the candle that reminds me to hold on, to think of her, and to remember.

Anyway, I want to believe her spirit is resting gently here with me, or somewhere in between, or maybe somewhere else completely.

But no, I want her to be here, I pray that she is here.

And, in my pocket, my fingers probe the slight weight and fragility of the shell – a sandy talisman of the permanence and the impermanence of it all.