I would like to say, “I have arrived at Sagres.” Saying, “I have arrived at Sagres” would give me some comfort, but I am sitting on a rock on the cliffs of Sagres the next morning and have discovered where one journey ends, the uncertainty of another begins …a journey from land to the passage toward the Green Sea of Darkness. I didn’t know one journey would end and another begin. My mother didn’t tell me that.

I walk along the stony path. The rain has gouged the red soil forming ditches baked by the sun and hardened by the wind. It is a stark landscape of dirt and rock that gently ascends by fits and starts to the cliffs over the sea. But, it is green too …with reeds and overgrown grass …and wildflowers growing up through the unrelentingly hard earth and peeking from the porous rock.

My mother has written about the gypsies who sell tablecloths in this stark space. They are hanging on lines and blowing in the strong wind toward the sea as if they long to be sails …white, loosely woven cotton table covers with spots of hand-embroidered color. My mother has bought the tablecloths. They are in an Eastern chest of hand-carved wood in the room of the things I have kept. They are folded into the darkness of the chest smelling of cedar and my mother’s elusive fragrance, but they have not forgotten their dreams to be sails. They have not forgotten the salt smell of the sea.

There are no gypsies today …nobody on this point of rock that jetties out into the sea …this hardened land that ends at the cliffs that plummet straight down into the ocean. There are no tablecloths …just the cliffs and the hard land leading up to them …just the sun and sky…just the blue sea …just the wind that howls on this barren piece of land …just me …and my mother. My mother is here, too.

I walk to the edge of the cliffs and sit on a rock. There is no place left to go …the ocean lashes the rocks far below. The draw of the ocean below lashing the rocks is beautiful as much as it is terrifying. There is only this place I am sitting …the one that teeters between the ocean and the land …this place that leaps into the sea. There is only the way back from where I am sitting. My mother is sitting on a rock, too. My father has disappeared down the side of the cliff to find the daring picture. My mother has the same sense of this place as I. She teeters between the ocean and the land. She feels, perhaps knows, that her back is against a cliff …a place she might falter …be dashed against the rocks, then drown as the waves have taken her out to sea …and, she knows she has come to a place that may require her to make a different journey. It is a fearful journey this late in her life.

She stands up from the rock and walks the barren land away from what she fears …from what she surely must know is the future. She picks the wild poppies for courage against the accidents that could come from the fragile negotiation that is her life.

I know my mother has picked the wild poppies for courage, because, when I leave that place, I find them in my hand.