A few weeks before we left Cape Cod, a coworker told me about a very old ship that had washed up on shore after a pretty big storm.

I don't know why, but I knew I had to go see it. And there it was... perhaps a hundred people were there that day, to see the old boat and to walk along the sands of the shore with dogs and family and friends.

I took a lot of pictures that day, and touched the deeply darkened wood, as dark as the bottom of the ocean. I thought of how probably no sunlight had shone upon this boat for decades.

Looking back on that day, and the pull I felt to see that old ship, I realized as I drove along a New Hampshire back road last week that it was the kinship I felt with this old boat that drew me to it. Life sometimes drags up wreckages to the shores of your life... through the death of a loved one.

There can be moments in time that get capsized by storms too tough to cope with and those moments, like gigantic ships, get shoved down deep into the depths of you... things you'd rather stay in that dark, suspended place in time. Salty waters of your tears creating the ocean that deepens the depth - until you are finally so far above the trauma and the chaos, able to swim away and reach a shore to carry on.

Eventually, though... those old ships will be dragged right back up. Death, like rough swells and storm surge, lift up those moments in time and deposit them right in front of you... do you look at them? touch them? confront them?

I had to... I always knew I would have to, and I knew it would be important that I not pretend the big, old ship of times gone by wasn't there.

I think there's probably about a dozen capsized wreckages that are still under the oceans of me.

So, I called my mother, figuring that rather than waiting for a storm to bring up other wreckages, I'd just scuba dive to see how things were going. It ended up being a very nice, calm talk, guided by my insisting we not venture into troubled water areas. Whirlpools that would drown us both. Basically, I left things many leagues under the sea, rather than trying to raise the Titanic.

This evening I've just been going through a year's worth of phone pictures and videos... figured I'd put some of them up on my blog (now that I figured out how to set that up to go automatically to this page.)

Most likely I'll just keep posting pics and vids, to clear out my phone, over the course of the next few weeks.