The Topsail Accord Read Online Free Page A

hurts the perfect cup. I know coffee.

Shannon
     
    Snowy egrets wade the canals looking for their breakfast beneath the bridge as I pass from the Topsail barrier island to the mainland. I think about the passage every time I make it. From the beach to the land. From the beach house to places that are not the beach house. Passing over the dark water of the Intracoastal, made dark by the banks of marsh grass and shadows of scrub trees and saw grass.
    It’s hard not to realize that you have left the beach because you have to drive over the bridge. It’s not a miles long causeway like it was at Nags Head. But it is a bridge. A tall bridge. A grey concrete bridge. That crosses the Intracoastal waterway and the brackish marshes where the birds I love wade and fish. I visit the egrets and herons and kingfishers that fish and mate and live in the narrow canals that wind in and out and around down below the bridge. I visit them in my kayak, though they never let me approach too closely.
    I think about the causeway at Nags Head. I can remember the first time we drove out to the Outer Banks over the causeway. Mile after mile of river and sound and marsh below with the two lane pavement and waist high concrete guard rails above and excitement and newness waiting ahead. And I remember driving back to the mainland by myself that last time, with the last tears I swore I would not cry still stinging my eyes with disappointment and heartache behind. That causeway crossed the Intracoastal, and the Alligator River, and miles and miles of flats and marshes where I saw countless birds that I craved visiting. But we never did go kayaking back in those little canals like we always said we would.
    There were so many things we never did. There was always some reason not to. I always wanted to, but it never happened. What I wanted to do never happened and who I wanted to be never happened. Making things much worse, during all these times when what I wanted to do didn’t happen and what I wanted to be didn’t happen, he didn’t do what he wanted to do and he wasn’t who he wanted to be. Between us we got nowhere and did nothing. And he blamed me, even though I was giving up practically everything so he could do what he wanted. I would have been happy if he had gone and done the things he wanted to do. Because then he would have come home happy, and inspired, and would not have been sitting around blaming me and blaming us that he never got to do what he wanted. That’s another thing he never really got about me. I wanted him to be happy. I wanted him to do the things he wanted to do. But he insisted that there was a way things “should” be done. That we should do things together. I did some things with him. I did that with him. But there is a finite amount I want to do with anyone. I like to be by myself, except when I don’t. He never got that about me.
    I reach the top of the bridge and sneak a short look over the side and down to the canals. The canals that I have paddled with my brother in law and with my nephew and by myself. I have done it. I have actually done it. I paddled. Once, and then again and again and then so often that now I can paddle it even when I am frozen in an Ohio winter. I can paddle it anytime by simply closing my eyes and feeling the kayak beneath me and the sun above me and the water all around. I have paddled it with my camera, with my sketch pad, with a thermos of coffee, and just by myself. I have paddled it at dawn, at dusk, and at every hour in between. I do things now that I didn’t do before.
    Before I was married I did things. And now after I am no longer married I do things. But while I was married I did nothing. I didn’t realize at the time how little I was doing. How everything was about my husband and what he wanted. About the baby we never had. About the family he wanted. About how he thought things “should” be. He could never escape the “shoulds.” Who invented the “shoulds?”
    I start