Spring Tide

For a time growing up, I lived on Sunset Island in Sunset Beach.  I had no idea it even had a name, that island.  Every year, in spring and in autumn, the spring tides would come and the streets would flood a few inches sometimes, sometimes a few feet.  Spring tides have nothing to do with the season and everything to do with the equinox and the moon and the nearness of our only natural satellite to earth.

It's been a long time since I lived in a place with spring tides.  I hadn't even thought Fort Lauderdale was that kind of place.  And then October comes and the new moon, and I head out to work one morning and the water is over the docks.  I'm walking in four inches of water, fish darting around my ankles, and it comes back to me, those mornings when the spring tide rose over the bulkheads and flooded the streets.  I feel young again, which may be this new love, this new life, certainly is all this possibility that stretches before me.

It's strange at 54 I find myself in place that is in some ways so much like where I lived when I was in junior high and high school.  Strange too that I find myself with a man who knew me during that time, loving him as I might have back then, the future stretching out before us, as if we have all the time in the world, even at our age.  I wonder if all of us need inundation now and then, if spring tides have a purpose not just for a land, but for the people who live there.  What's the message in these seasonal floods.  And is there a message in the timing, the full circle of childhood spring tides to these of middle age?  I know there is, so the question is what is that message for me?  I don't know, but I'm thinking I might at last find out.  Until I do, though, here's a bit of a poem by Emily Dickinson about the Spring Inundation:

THE INUNDATION of the Spring
Submerges every soul,
It sweeps the tenement away
But leaves the water whole.

In which the Soul, at first alarmed,       
Seeks furtive for its shore,
But acclimated, gropes no more
For that Peninsular.