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Not long ago, I came across a photograph online that I have not been able to forget. It showed a first edition of Gift from the Sea, opened to the flyleaf. There, in Anne Morrow Lindbergh's own handwriting, were a few simple words: For Gitzel and Vikron, with love from Anne, February 1955. I will never know who those recipients were. Dear friends, perhaps, or a couple who once showed her a kindness she wanted to honor. They are gone now, and so is Anne. Yet there was her handwriting, seventy years later, still leaning gently across the page toward two people she loved. My eyes filled, because that small book once found me, too. It was 1970. I was a young mother then, still discovering the shape of my own voice, still searching for what I felt I had been born to express but had not yet found words for. And into that searching came her small, luminous book, Gift from the Sea, written from a cottage on the island of Captiva, off the coast of Florida. Anne Morrow Lindbergh was, to the world, a wife and a mother. She was married to Charles Lindbergh, the aviator whose fame placed her permanently in the public eye, and she carried a grief almost too large to hold: the kidnapping and murder of their infant son. And yet, once a year, she gave herself something extraordinary. She spent a week alone in that small cottage, away from duty and away from the endless roles that had claimed her, to live inwardly and ask a question few women of her time were given permission to ask: Who am I, apart from all the people I belong to? She walked the beach each morning and gathered shells, and in her hands those shells became more than shells. They became metaphors for the seasons of a woman's inner life, for solitude, for growth, for the different shapes love takes as we move through the years. I read her words and felt, for the first time, that someone had given language to a longing I could not yet name. I think of that year often. My daughter Lexi was only four years old then, a small, bright presence underfoot, utterly unaware that her mother was quietly falling in love with the idea of an inner life. My devoted husband Paul, whom I would come to know as the most steadfast believer in that inner life I would ever have, trusted something in me even before I trusted it myself. He never once asked me to explain the pull I felt toward solitude and self-discovery. He simply made room for it. We were living then in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico, only a small town in those days, in a rented home along cobblestone streets that clattered with the wheels of carts and the soft footfall of a burro. A vendor came to our door most mornings, leading that same gentle animal, offering wildflowers for sale, their colors impossibly bright against the dust of the street. That house is gone now. That vendor, that burro, those particular cobblestones under that particular sky, all of it belongs only to memory. Paul is gone now, too. But I still have his handwriting.
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