Aruba : 3 Years And 4 Days Later

I’m sitting on sand so white that even the bleached smile of a middle-aged used Cadillac salesman pales in comparison. The smell of skunk weed drifts on the breeze, accompanied by the sounds of old men jousting over their domino game. To my left, tourists line the beach like a Roman legion. To my right, kite surfers, fishermen, and boaters move in clusters like small flocks of gulls. For the first time since my arrival, I get a moment to just relax and take in that special Caribbean blue that dreams are made of.

Sunset from the beach in question.

As the sun and sand do their job, for just a moment, it’s almost like I can see through time. It’s like watching a movie solely focused on this single location. A beach where I’ve made 100 important decisions, including telling my wife, “I think I could make the business run from here…” before we bought our home 20 years ago. I can see the sunsets, the tears when our dog died, the tens of years of laughing, playing with our tiny goddaughters in the surf before they could swim, burying the hatchet of arguments about the business, and crying together through the hard times. Of course, for a moment, the remembrance of a likely murder by a monster with a boyish grin, taking the life of a blond girl from Alabama, comes and goes too. You don’t get to edit the scenes. The movie plays on its own. But, even despite the occasional storm cloud, on this beach, there have been more sunny…