It's not easy to live artfully. With grace and reflection. With real imagination. Sometimes, art is simply wishful thinking, a desire to stretch beyond the quotidian rounds of dailiness: working, buying bread, pumping gas, paying bills, walking the dog. When I come home at night, sometimes it's all I can do to be a good wife and ask after the day, stir onions in a pan, fold the laundry. Sometimes, I simply ask, "can we not talk for awhile?" Which makes the Ranger wonder if aliens have taken over my body.

But just when we think art is gone for good, that we will never have enough time or get enough sleep to write something worthy, shoot an interesting photo or cook a meal that will perch in the blurry edges of memory, someone knocks on the door and delivers. Their own art. We have been supremely gifted this past week. For no particular reason. By friends. Neighbors. Co-workers. Moms. A jar of homemade BBQ sauce that transported us to the silky hill country of Tennessee. A pork roast with a savory walnut, raisin stuffing. A surf board with Mexican pesos pressed into it. Cookies shaped like bunny rabbits. Homemade beef jerky. A purple, ribboned blouse that screams, "take me to a party right now!" A tall, lanky bottle of garlic infused olive oil. A CD of MP3s we might have never discovered on our own, a little bit country, a little bit of rock and roll. A pretty, pink camisole that makes my boobs look young again. A silk scarf. A snapshot of a blazing sunset. A story about sheep and cheese making in Northern Spain. A bottle of Malbec.

To celebrate our good fortune, we packed our camera and some sandwiches and took to a stretch of beach we haven't visited in a long time. In the cracking surf, we remembered what it was like when things were still new. And tried to look with fresh eyes. This is what we saw.









And then we kept going.