For forty six years, I cared for my husband Matt, our three children, and later our grandchildren. After Matt died, I realized I had become so skilled at answering everyone else’s needs that I had stopped asking what I wanted. At sixty eight, I booked a month alone by the ocean in South Carolina.
On my fourth morning, a silver haired man advised me to keep an ugly shell because those usually carried the best stories. His name was Henry. He was seventy three, widowed, and staying nearby. Morning coffee became walks, and walks became dinners on the pier with key lime pie because we were too old to pretend we did not want dessert.
Henry understood the strange habit of sleeping on only one side of a bed after decades of marriage. With him, I was not a mother or grandmother first. I was a woman he wanted beside
