My Happy Place

“Imagine in your mind’s eye a beautiful, peaceful place in nature. This may be somewhere you’ve been before….”

These are words I use to help my clients enter a trance state, a meditative state. Imagining a place in nature—the colors, the scents, the feel of the breeze and the warm sun—all evoke within the mind and body a peaceful, relaxing feeling that naturally guides one down into a trance state. I often tell my clients when I am describing what will happen in a session that they will find themselves in the most tranquil place they’ve ever known and, as a parting gift, they get to take that place with them after our session ends. They have been introduced to their “happy place” and all they need to do to return there is take a couple of deep, filling breaths.

My happy place is Cindemar. My grandparents began building their dream home on the Atlantic Ocean the very day I was born. My mom likes to say that when I was born, the earth moved. Granddad was an electrical engineer and an inventor. He designed the house with an eye towards the weather. Sitting on the bluff above the beach, the house had a low profile and a steel reinforced foundation. It was hurricane proof. Grandmother added the softer touches that turned the house into something elegant and to us grandkids, a bit of kid heaven. And she gave the house its name—I don’t speak French, but I’ve been told Cindemar means “Cindie by the sea.”

There is a place out front on the ocean-side where I would go and sit to think and watch the waves. My grandparents have now passed away and house has sold, but I imagine that a part of my spirit must still be somehow visible in that one place where I go so often, and so completely.  There, I hear the waves and the calls of the sea bird—the gulls, the osprey, and the gulls. I know the feel of the sun on my head and the coolness of the salty breeze. I know the smell. I know how my skin feels in the humidity. I see the blue in the curve of a cresting wave, the sunlight catching it for a moment to light it from within. I see the cumulous clouds and the slow progress of ocean freighters off on the horizon. If I look hard enough, I can see all the way out to the Gulf Stream and notice how the ocean boils.  Though I cannot go there physically any more, I go there daily in my meditations.

We are visiting my mom in her new home in Florida, a home inland and about a twenty-minute drive from Cindemar. A few days ago, we drove past the property and discovered that it has been torn down. A construction fence surrounds the lot, which has been leveled with the exception of a few palm trees, a large landscaping rock where Grandmother used to have her bird feeder and a few plants. Gone is the pool, the sunken garden where Keith and I were married, the rock where the pastor stood to perform the ceremony, the secret tunnel that led from the garage to the beach, the secret trapdoor that led from Granddad’s closet to his workshop in the basement (so he could get to his work without having to run the gauntlet of Grandmother’s “hen parties”), the little mini-fridge in the lounge always filled with cokes in the bottles. Gone is the tower where I would go with my books to hide myself away and read.

Gone is the secret hope that one of the kids would grow up and make it big in the world and be able to buy back Cindemar. My happy place, however, is still with me. For even as I write this, I am there, all my senses engaged in strolling the property.

I am wondering if the kind police officer who stopped to check us out and ended up chatting with us a few days ago as we stood outside that construction fence feeling the shock of this new death isn’t driving by tonight, wondering what that strange glow is there near the sea wall. Perhaps the rumor of a ghost will start. It will just be a little piece of me, getting happy.