It was still dark when he handed it to me.
I was at the pier before first light, doing what I do, and a friend I know from the sunrise approached my striped beach chair with a folded piece of paper in his hand. He said he had written something, had been reading my book, and it had stirred something in him; he had not written a verse in years. His mother died this month. Her services are this week. I had assumed, if he wrote anything at all this season, it would be for her.
There was no light to read it by yet. I tucked it in my pocket, saving his words to savor after the sunrise had restored me. I needed to be still with my own thoughts before God.
Today is September first. For years, this square on the calendar has belonged to a first date, and I would like there to come a year when September first is simply a Tuesday, a day I did laundry or it rained. That year is not this year. I know what today is, and I suspect the calendar is not the only place it is remembered.
Nevertheless, I did not want to give this day to him. I went to the water, the way I go every morning, to give this day to God instead. And a man handed me a folded page in the dark.
A lady caught me snapping photos of the heron this weekend at Yorktown beach, and she asked, “Are you the lady who the chases the light?”
Yes, that’s me. I chase the sun; I’m just not sure I have been living.
I have been observing. I go to the water twice a day, I stand at the edge of it with a camera, and I photograph other people living lives. Families. Couples. A homeschooling mother with her little ones at the edge of the bay who offered to move out of my frame, and I told her no, her family was the picture. Kids on bicycles. Fishermen. A man and his dog. I am always outside of it, tripod in hand, watching the good thing happen to somebody else and making sure it gets remembered.
I do not go to the beach to play or swim or read or sunbathe anymore. My soul needs the sunrise and the sunset like my lungs need air. I go for stability and light in a search for meaning in the shape of a photograph.
I am not longing for what I lost. I had those days. I had cookouts and sandy towels and a house full of noise, I had purpose as a wife and as a mother, and those memories are real and they are mine and I am not sitting here wishing for their return. I do not want that back. I’m waiting for what comes next. I know to keep showing up at the water, faithfully. Twice a day, there is peace, at first and last light.
Saturday morning, I woke up and could not have cared less about my own book signing.
I was heavy. Friends of mine are burying people they love; I have been carrying that with them. I halfheartedly dressed for a book signing at Paperbacks Ink. I called Mama Marci, and she told me to think of the people who needed to hear my story. I dried my tears, put on my make up, and Mary Beth showed up to take photos. She coaxes me to celebrate this book on the days I am too tired to want anything, and I would not have gotten through the summer without her.
Mama Marci was right in ways I hadn’t anticipated.
A father came to the table and asked me to sign a copy for his son, who he believes is living with bipolar disorder. He wanted to understand his boy. I wrote his son’s name in the front of my book and handed it back to a man who was trying, and that alone would have been enough for one Saturday.
A woman easily disclosed to me that she thinks she might have bipolar disorder, and that she is also a person of faith. I know what it costs to say that to a stranger… I’d hidden inside that sentence for years. I signed her book and have thought about her every day since, wondering what her next year looks like. She has the book in her hand now I wish had existed when I was diagnosed.
There was a lull in the signing when I could think back to the highlight from the previous signing. The week before, at Barnes and Noble’s, a couple told me the book had changed their marriage. He was a Christian man who would not go get help. Something in those pages made him look at himself, and he went, he was diagnosed, he is medicated, and he is a different man now. She told me she does not care how many years they have left because now they will be good ones. That alone would have been enough reason to publish my manuscript.
My thinking was quickly interrupted by an invitation. There was a writers’ workshop in the bookstore, and at the end of their session, someone asked if I would come speak to them. No warning. Nothing prepared. I stood up in front of a room of strangers and for fifteen minutes the words simply came. I could not have written a better version of it if I had been given a month. They asked questions. I had answers. I talked about writing, about publishing, about faith and bipolar disorder and the gap between them that nobody was filling, and about finding sanctuary. I was not selling anything. Several of them bought the book anyway.
I have been trying to describe how that felt. The closest I can get is this. For fifteen minutes I was not standing outside the glass. I was not observing. I was in it, and I was useful, and I felt real and valuable and like a woman with a purpose, and I had forgotten that feeling existed. I used to dream of a speaking tour after publishing. That was the direction all of this was heading before February happened, and I set it down. Saturday, I picked it up and found it still fit my hand.
I am going to pray for more of it.
Perhaps the most precious moment from Saturday was a mother who brought two students to the signing. One is in my first block this year and the other is a former student. She bought both of my books for each of them, and I signed all four. They brought me balloon animals. On one of them, the elder child had written my name in Sharpie.
Ms. Palma.
On the first day of school, three weeks ago, that same girl called me Mrs. Ramos. It was not her fault. That was my name when she was in my third block last spring in one of the hardest seasons I have ever taught, when I had almost no voice and had to run a classroom with chimes and reading circles and every trick I could invent because I could not raise my voice above the room. Some of those kids made it harder on purpose. She was not one of them; she was kind and thoughtful and tender, a bright spot in the chaos.
And on a balloon, in permanent marker, she gave me back my name. A twelve-year-old figured it out on her own how important that was to me.
Sunday morning, we sang about a house. Rain came, wind blew, my house was built on you.
I stood in that room and sang through tears. I kept thinking that if the house I built was built on Him, it would still be standing, and it is not standing, and what does that say about the foundation. The rain came. The wind blew. The house came down.
Then it turned over in my mind. The Spirit was being patient with me.
That house was ours. This house is mine. My body is a temple of the Holy Spirit who is in me, whom I have from God, and I am not my own, I was bought with a price. That house has not fallen. It got shaken hard enough that everything not fastened to the foundation came off of it, and it is still standing here on a Sunday morning with its mouth open, singing.
Our worship pastor Hunter preached out of John 12. Jesus said He came as light into the world so that whoever believes in Him would not remain in darkness. That was the point of the ministry, that we would not be left in the dark. He talked about obedience and loving the glory of God more than anything else in the world, and he asked whether we could say that about ourselves. I sat with that one a while.
When the service ended, my small group leader Sarah put her arms around me and reminded me of a precious truth: God’s favor isn’t protection from the storms — it’s provision inside of them.
After the sun rose this morning, I put down my camera and took the folded page out of my bag.
My sunrise friend had written a poem about me.
Not about his mother, whom he is burying this week. About me. About a woman on the old battlefield at Yorktown, and the monument, and the rising sun, and sand carried home in her toes. I read it twice, and then a third time. It ends by calling what I am doing out here the “brutally honest and vulnerable revolution of independence of the beautiful mind.”
He signed it and dated it. September 1, 2026.
He had no idea what that date was. He doesn’t know what it’s meant to me for years, or how I have been bracing for it. He was just a grieving man who read a book by a woman he sees at the pier most mornings, and it moved him to write for the first time in years. He chose today to put it in my hands because today was the day he finished it.
If you have a date like that on your calendar, one you can see coming from a month away, I want you to know that it can be written over. Not erased, but something else can happen on it, something with your actual name on it, and it can happen while you are standing in the dark waiting for permission to read.
I came out here this morning to surrender a date. I went home holding a poem with my name at the top of it and September 1 at the bottom. The sunrise restores. God redeems.
Writer's Growth 