I sit and write, looking out my window at the ocean and the horizon and the setting sun. I have found a place of peace, a brief moment of rest, and I reflect on a strange week.

Even as I looked forward to this breath of salt-laden air, a lamb died this morning. I would ask why, but those who know sheep know that they will take any excuse to pass on. Although perhaps there is another why, a why that asks how joy, rest and death could all coexist in the same instant, the same memory, shoved together like poorly fitting bookends that could topple at any moment.

It is a moment.

The lamb fell ill the day before the 4th of July, and only worsened with each passing day. I had just returned from a camping trip, still smelling of campfire smoke and pipe tobacco. We thought she might recover, but we worried nonetheless, and so spent a day of celebration in a state of constant anxiety, wondering what the next day, the next hour, might bring.

And so she survived, longer than we could have hoped for, but it was too much to hope that she might recover. She survived, but in agony and so it was a mercy that it finally ended this morning.

Perhaps that is the answer then. I ask why and there it is. We spent the day worrying over something that might have been, our wiser selves knowing how it would end, but daring to hope that it might have been otherwise.

If someday I can find the means to hope without fear or worry, maybe then I can finally rest, sitting on the shore and looking out over the deep. Maybe that is what I am feeling now, though I am never sure of such things.

Maybe tomorrow will be better.

I can always hope.