Yesterday morning, I got to the pier before the light.

My blue heron friend was already there. A dark shape perched in the shallows upon his twig legs, unmistakable. He was close enough I didn’t need the camera to know it was him. He let me sit with him. He usually does.

No photographs or agenda, just the two of us in the remarkable darkness. Not waiting for the dawn because we both know that half hour before it crests is where the magic lives, ever changing light and cloud formations, and we never know what colors will show up that day or in that ten-minute span.

Then, Santa Billy came with his tractor.

The heron lifted off and glided over the pier to the jetties on the far side, unhurried, like he’d been planning to leave anyway. I jogged over to Billy and told him to turn off the tractor. He had seen the heron, too. We stood in the quiet I’d asked for, and I took a few shots in the silence before climbing up onto the tractor to give Billy a hug.

He said I made his day. That made me smile.

This morning was different. Windy. Cold. No heron. Kevin didn’t show up until after the sun crested, carrying a banana and a bottle of water because he tries to make sure I eat. Before he arrived, I had a lot of time to watch the world wake up alone. The river was alive with whitecaps pushing toward shore, the gulls loud, and a sky painted like heaven even if no one else was there to see it but me.

It was all alive. I don’t feel alive, but I was grateful for breath in my lungs. For quiet. For stillness before a day full of sixth graders who need me to be present.

I keep showing up. Sunrise. Gym. School. Sea glass strolls with Tito at sunset. I bookend my days with water — the York River in the morning, the Chesapeake or the James in the evening. Saturday, I started at the pier and ended at Denbigh docks. Sunday, I started at the pier, went to church, picked up groceries, and spent four hours in the yard before landing at Fort Monroe beach.

Four hours. Weed whacking. Blowing leaves. Reclaiming the edges of the driveway no one had maintained since fall. Getting on my hands and knees to pull what had crept in while I wasn’t looking. Every chore I face alone is a small reckoning. Every edge I take back is mine. There is still so much work to do.

And then I looked at the daffodils.

I planted them three years ago. I remember pushing bulbs into the hard clay along the front walk, believing what I planted would transform and bring new life, love popping up in shades of yellow. They come back every spring reminding me that each season inevitably submits to the next one, but each season will get another turn, next year and the year after that. Spring follows winter.

I’ve tried to leave it all behind. Then, the daffodils come up and remind me how hard I worked to turn this place into a home. I can’t abandon what I built just because it hurts to stand in it. This is my version of closure, working through every first after what I hadn’t known would be lasts.

Sunday evening, after the yard, I took Tito to Fort Monroe for a sunset stroll. I brought my ukulele, Summer Sarah. It had been a beach day for others, seventy degrees and loud, but by sunset the crowds had cleared. I sat on the rocks and tried to work out a chord progression, but without my voice, the melody wouldn’t come to my fingers. The chords need the singing to find their shape, and my voice isn’t there yet.

A group of young people was still on the beach. They threw a ball for Tito. I watched them — the easy way they laughed, the way they moved without thinking about it. They asked me to sing them a song. I told them to look for me this summer when I’m better, and I’d honor their request.

That’s the truest thing I can say about where I am. I’m not better yet, but I’m planning on summer.

I smile in spite of myself at the pier each morning. I don’t always feel God’s arms around me. I wish I could. Nevertheless, sometimes the sunrise feels like His embrace. The light touching the water before it touches me, warming what it reaches, patient with what it hasn’t gotten to yet.

Had I not written my first manuscript — had I not spent two years tracing the long arc of my life from shame to faith — I don’t know that I would have survived the last seven weeks. Somewhere in the writing of it, I learned what true sanctuary was. It wasn’t in a family. Families are human, and humans fail each other. It wasn’t in a name or a plan or a porch swing I’d been dreaming about since Mrs. Feldman’s class. Sanctuary was in a relationship with my Creator, the One who shows up at the pier every morning whether I feel Him or not. The One who doesn’t need me to be better before He stays.

The motions are not nothing. They are the discipline of someone who has decided to survive long enough to live again. Sunrise. Gym. School. Yard. Pier. Ukulele. Sea glass. Repeat. As long as I keep showing up at the sunrise, I somehow know I’ll be okay.

The heron doesn’t show up every morning, but I do. I believe that right now, all God is asking of me is to be faithful. To keep walking to the water, to keep planting things in hard clay, to keep promising summer to strangers on a beach.

The daffodils came back, so will I.