It’s not yet morning as I sit here writing in a little kitchen nook at this seaside house where I am staying. I was up early to drive my daughter to the bakery where she is working for the day, where she will jump in a white van soon after and head to the farmers’ market where there will be bustles of people and gorgeous fruits and vegetables, just picked from the farm, and flowers in a multitude of colors laid out on makeshift tables. A melancholic sky hovers over the cobbled houses as I drive back through still streets, some with golden lights illuminating other early risers, like the old man next door who writes late into the night and again at this faint hour. The sea mingles with the morning drift as the distant dreams of gulls flutter in the background.

I’m thinking how much the world turns and changes and circles and comes back again, recalling my daughter standing in the bakery  leaning against the hard metal table, just minutes ago, paper coffee cup in hand, watching as rows of croissants and sugar-layered pastries are lined up on large trays, listening with a teenagers glint as she is given instructions. It’s strange enough to think I am who I am and she is she and meaning that she is my daughter and that I’m this age, and only a year from now she will be moving on to college or whatever/wherever she choses to go, and perhaps it will be me standing there, leaning in similarly (again) talking to my step-mother who has been working like this ever since I can remember, and under whose direction I first rolled out that same flaky dough and made pots of sticky, strawberry jam and picked apricots in an orchard somewhere out in the dusty beyond near Gilroy.

My daughter who has always known a good croissant vs an ok one, but  never so much showed an interest in learning the art until recently, out of the blue, told me that she wanted to become a pastry chef (or a dancer, or a business woman). She spent over an hour the other day thumbing through a book on Pacific rim cuisine picking out the recipes she wanted to make this weekend–tapioca with caramelized mango, tropical fruit salad with fresh coconut. Was it the dessert book I gave her for Christmas, I wondered? You know, the kind of present you give because you know they’ll love it but they won’t admit it, but instead look at you kind of sideways. Not that it really mattered, it only made me smile inside and hope that whatever she choses to do she’ll do it because she loves it and because it makes her happy.

Just this week, she asked me in all seriousness why I didn’t become a UPS driver when I feigned a sigh over the state of my work situation and the challenges to keep up in the freelance market. “They make $25 per hour to start,” she said, looking at me, her head cocked ever so slightly, and truly curious. I remember those years of watching and looking around me and trying to understand the mechanics of living and working and finding out what it is we want to do with our lives that makes any sense at all. Never would I be like them, I used to think–them being anyone and everyone around me at the time, who lived what seemed like boring, repetitive lives in a flat city where they grew vegetables. I remember it being hard to fathom, completely, what one did with oneself to make it different.

I didn’t go to college right off, as she probably will. No one ever mentioned it, though I wanted to and had the grades. Instead I got out of high school a year early, waved my certificate in the air amidst an ocean of purple and gold streamers on graduation day feeling terribly lonely amidst all these kids I didn’t relate to. That fall I went to Europe where so much became alive; a year or so later I moved to Hawaii.

Not sure what it is about today or even this week that stirs these memories. How it is we begin in one place and meander, and root, and find our way through the forrest, eventually.