The Tidal Bore

CHRIST IN WINTER: Reflections on Faith from a place of winter For the Years of Winter…

Helen talked about seeing it so much and so often that we began to call her The Tidal Bore.

The Bay of Fundy in Nova Scotia has the highest tidal range in the world. Sometimes the tide is so low that row boats simply hang from pier poles, suspended several feet above the mud. Then the tide comes back. At Truro you can watch it travel up the Shubenacadie River, It’s called “the tidal bore.”

I was still rather depleted from surgery and a year of chemo. I was within the “one to two” year range that I understood from my first oncologist was my life expectancy. I didn’t know if I had any adventures left in me, but I wanted Helen to be able to see that unusual natural phenomenon that fascinated her so much. I wanted us to have an adventure together.

We flew to Boston and rented a car and drove up to Truro, to the mouth of the Shubenacadie, and we sat on the shore and waited.

I had assumed it was a wild gush of water that would come roaring up the river. I was hoping I could get back from the shore in time to keep from drowning. But that was not the way the bore came. It was slow and deliberate, and it took every hanging boat and raised it back up until it floated on the surface once again.

Sometimes there is a moment, no bigger than a baby’s toe, maybe even smaller, a piece of dandelion fluff in the breeze perhaps, but that toe fluff moment is so full, so round, so whole, that in it bubbles all the joy that I have ever known, or will ever know, and then it is gone forever, yet it floats on the breeze and smiles at every other moment, as they pass by.

That’s the way our tidal bore moment came. Sometimes that’s the way God’s grace comes.

JRMcF

The “place of winter” mentioned in the title line is Iron Mountain, in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, where life is defined by winter even in the summer!

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{I also write the fictional “Periwinkle Chronicles” blog. One needs a rather strange sense of humor to enjoy it, but occasionally it is slightly funny. It is at http://periwinklechronicles.blogspot.com/}

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