Over the past decade, I’ve come to love our home in the mountains. So much so that I thought that despite a lifetime of deep soul connection to the ocean, the coast no longer moved me. In recent years we’ve vacationed as a family to seashores and I’ve thought, meh. It’s fine.

That changed this summer. A couple of weeks ago, we visited family in Sarasota then spent a few days on a Gulf island in Florida. I woke every morning before dawn, walked to the white beach with my coffee, and sat in the sand to watch sandpipers stroll in the splash zone. They teetered on toothpick legs and plunged their needle beaks in wet sand to feed on coquina clams.

Whatever mountain wall I had put up crumbled, and I fell in love with the sea again.

This past week, I returned to my childhood home on Tybee Island to help my parents after a surgery. On my way down south, and on my way down a mountain, I was sideswiped in a hit and run that damaged the rental car I was in. I am totally fine! The car was drivable but to be on the safe side, after getting a police report and spending hours on the phone with insurance and the rental car company, I drove to the nearest Enterprise office to swap it out. They were wonderful, so kind and helpful. The only replacement car they had was a convertible mini Cooper. I didn’t care what it was, I just wanted to get back on the road — I still had six hours of driving to go.

When I pulled into my parents’ driveway that afternoon, I unloaded my luggage and groceries from the trunk and didn’t give the car another thought. My focus was on getting my parents settled after the surgery, figuring out how everything was going to go, and making their lives easier.

At the end of the first day home, they were exhausted after the surgery and a night in the hospital, and they turned in early. The breeze was up — the palm fronds waved like tendrils of hair — and the sky began to pink as the sun sank. I remembered the car. I grabbed my phone and my keys, slid on my flip flops, and found the button to push to put the top down.

Driving to the beach under an open sky transported me back to my high school days in my first car, a convertible VW beetle. I felt so alive then, and I felt so alive now. I drove to the south end of the beach where kite surfers played in the waves at sunset. I walked barefoot in the sand, the wind whipping my fluttery pants, and I felt like I’d come home.

Every day after that, I put the top down before sunrise and drove to the beach to welcome the new day. The Odyssey is on my mind after re-reading it recently, and I smiled each day when the clouds turned pink and Dawn reached her rosy fingers across the sky. The morning sky is the same now as it was 3000 years ago, and I like to think of it now in Homer’s poetic words.

On my final night, I drove out for one last sunset. While pink was still in the sky, the full moon rose over the ocean. Surfers caught gentle waves in the path of the moonlight on the water, and my soul sighed with the beauty of it.

I’m happy to report that everyone is doing great, and I’m so grateful I was able to go down and help my folks. I’m grateful for the unexpected reconnection to the ocean, which is also a reconnection to myself. And I’m grateful to my company for the generous and flexible leave policy that allowed me to take this time from work to help my family. Despite the not-so-fun surgery circumstances (and the not so fun car accident), it was a deeply restorative trip. We had a beautiful week together.