I celebrated my birthday this past weekend with a beautiful swim at Chicken Ranch Beach in Tomales Bay. My cousin Kathleen was in town, and a gaggle of Blue Booby swim friends joined us for a gorgeous day of swimming, communing, eating delicious food, and lying around in the January sunshine, talking and laughing.

But what I want to write about today is my birthday last year. Last year, I also went to Chicken Ranch Beach in Tomales Bay with a bunch of boobies, and the magic of that day was why I wanted to do it again.  

Last year on my birthday, I was swimming through rivers of grief. My dad had died less than a month earlier, and the thought of becoming another year older without him in this world was unbearable to me. I woke up crying and spent most of the morning in and out of tears. It was a brilliant sunny day in Inverness, and Tomales Bay gleamed golden in the morning light, but even all that beauty made me sad. We swam and then ate a delicious spread; we lounged in the sun. But, while everyone chatted around me, I felt a numb distance from it all; grief was like a heavy cloak I couldn’t emerge from.

Then came the goats. 

A dog came trotting down to the beach with four goats in tow. No humans, just a dog and her goats. I was immediately awash in delight. Goats! They said hello to us and to the other groups gathered in the sand. They bleated and nosed curiously at our stuff. We laughed and shook our heads in disbelief. Where did they come from? Where were their humans? After a little while, the dog took off, and the goats followed. All but one little goat who lingered on the beach. We spent the next hour reuniting the wayward goat with her friends and the whole motley crew with their humans.

Everything shifted with the arrival of those goats. Lightness and joy cracked through my grief for the first time in weeks. When I got back home, I remembered this placard that my dad had sent to Eliza when she broke her arm in the fourth grade. It still hangs in her bedroom. 

It was hard not to believe my dad sent those goats, even if he, himself, staunch atheist that he was, would be scandalized by the idea (despite the bible quote on this placard…at least I think that’s the bible?). However they came to be there, the reminder that joy existed, that I was still capable of feeling it, was a tremendous gift.

We didn’t have any goat appearances at this year’s birthday swim, but I didn’t need goats to feel joy this year. We swam, we ate, we laughed, we talked, and later we ate some more at Hog Island Oysters. It was a beautiful day.