The Ocean: Memory Row, Lost and Found in the Fog

Lauren Nixon-Matney • June 18, 2025
The Ocean: Memory Row, Lost and Found in the Fog

It hit me all at once.


The salt in the air. The soft hush of fog curling around old rooftops. Sea lions barking like ghosts from the other side of a memory I hadn’t lived but somehow still knew. Monterey didn’t feel like the first time. It felt like walking into a dream someone else had held for me, carefully folded and saved, like a story pressed between the pages of an old book.


And that someone was Jamie.


He had talked about Cannery Row for years. About the ocean, the aquarium, the fog, the street. He told me I’d love it not in the way people say that about places you might visit someday, but in the way someone says, “I’ve been saving this for you.”


The smell alone nearly broke me. That mix of seaweed and memory. Childhood and rust. We hadn’t even made it past the first corner before my eyes welled up and my chest cracked open just a little. Jamie squeezed my hand, already smiling like he’d known. Of course he had. He always does.


This wasn’t just a stop on a map.

This was Cannery Row.

And we had finally made it.


[Then: Mrs. Wells & the Spark of Literature]


I was sixteen the first time I read Of Mice and Men.

Small town Texas high school, junior year English. The kind of classroom where the windows sometimes stuck and the lights hummed overhead. But none of that mattered, because Mrs. Wells was the kind of teacher who lit the whole room from the inside out.


She was young, brilliant, passionate the kind of woman who made you want to understand. She didn’t just teach literature. She embodied it. Arms moving with each sentence, voice full of heat and heartbreak, pacing around the room like she was leading us somewhere ancient and holy. And somehow, she was.


She didn’t just show us Steinbeck she translated him.

She taught us how to read for the ache, how to listen between the words. How to see ourselves inside the loneliness, the longing, the little human kindnesses that lived between Lennie’s hands and George’s sighs. I still remember her voice as she read the ending. The room had gone quiet. Not because we were afraid of the silence, but because we felt it. Together. And that was her gift.


She broke me open and gave me language for what I already carried inside.

Not just about the books but about how to write.

How to look deeper.

How to feel on purpose.

How to make sense of the chaos by putting it into story.


I wrote some of my favorite high school pieces in her class—paragraphs and pages I can still feel in my bones. And though I never got to thank her the way I wanted to, I carry her with me still. Every time I return to a book. Every time I open a memory like a map.


Every time I remember that stories aren’t just things we read.

They’re things we become.


[Then: Jamie, The Odyssey, and Mr. Ramsey]


Long before he was mine, Jamie was once a boy in Monterey.


He still talks about it with that light in his voice that good childhood glow. The kind of happiness that settles deep and stays with you, even as the years shift and scatter. He remembers the ocean air. The way the town felt both peaceful and alive. When he speaks of it, it’s not in detail so much as energy... a kind of golden warmth he carries in his chest.


And then there’s Mr. Ramsey.


His favorite teacher. Ever.

He said it the same way every time with a kind of reverence that didn’t need to be explained. Mr. Ramsey had this calm, poetic way about him. The kind of man who made you feel smarter just for being in the room. Who made the Odyssey feel less like a dusty assignment and more like a map of the soul.


Jamie still remembers reading it for the first time in that classroom, and thinking: this is what stories are supposed to feel like.


It wasn’t about ancient gods or wooden horses. It was about finding your way back to something you lost. About getting bruised along the way, but coming home anyway. That story burrowed into him, settled somewhere deep and never left.


Sometimes I think Mr. Ramsey and Mrs. Wells were working together before we ever met. Like they knew we’d need this someday.

A girl raised on Steinbeck’s aching beauty.

A boy raised on Homer’s long return.


And now here we were.

Walking the same streets Jamie once walked as a child.

Both of us carrying the people who taught us to love words.

Both of us writing a story that had been waiting for us.


[Now: The Aquarium, Doc’s Ghost, and the Quiet Sacred]


The Monterey Bay Aquarium wasn’t just beautiful.

It was sacred.


Jamie had come here as a kid. That fact alone was enough to split me open. Watching him walk through the same space again but this time with our children, with me was almost too much beauty to hold. There was something circular about it. Something beyond words. Like the ocean itself had waited, patient and wide, for this moment to arrive.


It felt like stepping into a Steinbeck story.

Into Doc’s lab, refracted through glass and wonder.


It felt like a resurrection.

Like the bones of something sacred had been preserved in glass and tidewater, waiting for someone to remember what it all meant.


It was Doc’s world not in name, but in feeling.


Western Biological, reborn through filtered light and the hum of blue tanks. The man who had once catalogued sea life like scripture, his spirit still moving through the corridors, quiet as a ripple.


And there was Jamie walking through it like he’d never left.


Because he hadn’t, not really. He’d been here as a boy. He’d carried it. And now he carried us through it, gently, like a man offering something fragile.


Doc never asked to be understood.

He simply observed.

He listened.

He gave his life to tidepools, to music, to humanity in its roughest forms.

And somehow, standing in that room, I saw all of that in Jamie.


Not just in the way he looked at the sea life, but in the way he looked at us.

As if we were something fragile, something beautiful.

As if he knew before I ever did that this was a kind of homecoming.


[The Ocean]


It was everywhere.


The rhythm of the tide.

The pulse in Jamie’s step.

The way memory moved in layers past, present, something beyond—all folding into one.


We didn’t need to hear the song.

It was already playing.


The Ocean.

The one Led Zeppelin wrote like it was pulled straight from the bones.

Wild, rhythmic, uncontainable.

A little messy.

A little magic.

Just like this.


There was something in the air that felt like it had been looping for decades something electric, reverent, familiar. Like a needle dropped on a record that never really stopped spinning. The kind of current that lives in your chest before you even know what to call it.


Jamie carried it.

Not in a loud way. Not in words.

In the way he looked at the sea. In the way he looked at me.


It was all part of the same music.

The road, the Row, the aquarium.

The otters. The fog.

Our children laughing in the wind.

The weight of a place you dreamed into being long before you arrived.


This wasn’t just a trip.

It was a verse.

One we’d been writing for years.

And somehow, the ocean already knew the melody.


[A Musical Moment]


In Cannery Row, there’s this moment: quiet, simple, where Doc finally plays the record he’d wanted to hear all along. Octet for Strings by Mendelssohn. The chaos has come and gone. The noise, the party, the breaking and the trying again. But in that one moment, when the music plays, everyone just stops. No speeches. No explanations. Just stillness. And it’s perfect.


The music isn’t background. It’s balm.

It’s understanding without explanation.

It’s what love sounds like when everyone stops talking.


Not because the music fixes anything. But because it holds everything.

The ache, the joy, the effort.


That’s the kind of moment I felt with Jamie on this trip.

Not loud. Not showy. Just that soft kind of understanding that only arrives after you’ve already lived through the wild parts.


 [Closing]


There’s something sacred about returning to a place you’ve never been.

Like walking into a memory that doesn’t belong to you but still lets you in.


That’s what this trip was.

Not a destination. A convergence.


Jamie’s boyhood. My stories. The teachers who saw us before we saw ourselves.

The songs. The pages. The ghosts.


Even my dad somehow, I felt him here too.

In the way the wind moved. In the stillness after laughter. In the quiet between tides.

He would’ve loved this place.

Loved seeing Jamie carry the past like something sacred.


We didn’t set out looking for revelation.

We just wanted the ocean.

But it gave us more.


It gave us time, folding in on itself.

It gave us our kids, spinning on sacred soil in the same air Jamie once breathed.

It gave us something unspoken, but understood.


And when we drove away—

I could still smell it, that mix of seaweed and memory. The place we’d been. The story we’d lived. Still clinging, soft and sacred, like it didn’t want to let go either.


A road.

A row.

A writer.

A song.

And the man who brought me there.

The Ocean: Memory Row, Lost and Found in the Fog John Steinbeck: Cannery Row Led Zepplin: The Ocean Monterey Bay Aquarium California Canary Row

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Searching For Stars

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Good, Strong Words That Mean Something: A Letter of Light Through Pixelated Waves (for Heidi Clements)

By Lauren Nixon-Matney • July 5, 2026
My favorite literary phrase of all time is spoken by Josephine March, written by Louisa May Alcott in Little Women. “I like good, strong words that mean something.” You, my dear, you say good, strong words that mean something. You put good, strong words that mean something into the world, and I thank you so very sincerely for that. You have made such an incredible impact on my life, and on my outlook on beauty and aging. ⸻ I stumbled across your incredible fashion sense on Instagram and was completely hooked on your vibe. I absolutely love fashion. I always have. I’ve definitely had my own kind of zany style over the years. So when I saw you, I was like, OK, yes, she is amazing. I love this energy. ⸻ The way you put things together, the confidence, the energy, it makes you wanna get up, go into your closet, and actually enjoy getting dressed again. And for a woman approaching 40, who’s had three children and has had many of her own struggles with who am I, what’s my fashion, what’s my energy, or what’s my style, You just felt so damn refreshing and inspiring. So I hung around, but what really hooked me wasn’t just the style, it was you, the essence of you. The way you talk, the honesty, the fact that you just say things straight, no fluff, no sugarcoating, no trying to be anything other than exactly who you are.. and somehow that makes everything you say sound even more profound. ⸻ The impact your message was having in my life became undeniable. It wasn’t just something I watched for enjoyment anymore, it was something I actually began feeling, and carrying with me. I grew up in a time where it felt like there was an expiration date on women. Like if you didn’t fit into a certain mold, or size, or type… your worth somehow became less. And then life happens. You grow up. You age. Maybe have kids. Your body changes. Your priorities change. Somewhere in the middle of all of that, you can kind of lose your sense of… who am I now? What’s my style? Who am I supposed to become? Am I too late for something? What even feels like me anymore? So for a while, I think I actually bought into that idea without even realizing it. The idiodic notion that maybe I had passed some invisible point where things were supposed to quiet down. Tone down. Fit into something more “acceptable.” Or the grand illusion that I was out of time to follow my passions! But watching you… that narrative just started to fall apart. The way you show up, the way you speak, the way you move through the world so fully as yourself… it made me realize that aging isn’t something to fear or shrink from. If anything, it’s where things start to get really good. It’s where you get bolder. More comfortable. More you. More beautiful. ⸻ What you’re doing matters so much. The way you show up, the way you speak, the way you fully own who you are, it doesn’t just stay on a screen. It carries through pixelated waves. It reaches people like me, in real life, in real moments, and shifts something quietly but powerfully within us. So I just wanted to say thank you. For your honesty, your energy, your style, your voice… all of it. You have inspired me, Searching for Stars, and undoubtedly countless women all over the world more than words can truly translate. Thank you, for being you!

Getting Your Pink Back: Answered Prayers, Quiet Signs, Bluebirds and a Business Professional Poodle (A Letter of Light for Lindsey Gurk)

By Lauren Nixon-Matney • May 6, 2026
Okay, so I asked God for a sign this week… and I didn’t make it easy on Him. I had just seen this video about asking for a sign, about how God answers, about how He delights in it… and something in me just… recognized that. Like, oh. I’ve felt that before. Lindsey, it was your video. And the second I heard it, I remembered something. I remembered a time, years ago, back in that early, foggy, pinkless season of motherhood, when I had asked for a sign too. I had prayed, really specifically… really honestly… “God, just show me I’m okay. Show me I’m on the right path.” And I asked for a blue butterfly. I didn’t see it right away. I waited. I wondered if I had imagined the whole idea in the first place. And then, not long after, life moved us somewhere new. A new place, new energy… the kind of move that feels exciting and terrifying all at once. They handed us the keys… and right there on them… was a blue butterfly. And I remember feeling that same quiet recognition. Like… okay. And then, a couple months after that, with prayers inside us building for a second child, we went to a park. One of those ordinary days that turns into something you don’t forget. And there were butterflies everywhere. Hundreds of them. Yellow, filling the air, lifting all at once like something out of a dream. And right in the middle of it… one blue butterfly. I just stood there, overwhelmed, because I knew. I knew I had been heard. Nearly one year to the day later, our second child was born. And then… life kept moving. Time passed. Things got busy. Full. Loud. Beautiful… but a little hazy, too. Somewhere along the way, I think I stopped asking like that. Fast forward. I’m sitting with my kids on New Year’s Eve, going into 2025, talking about goals and dreams. The kind of things you say out loud but don’t always fully claim. “I’ve always wanted to write.” And my daughter, so sure, so certain, just looked at me and said, “Then make it your New Year’s resolution.” And something about the way she said it… she didn’t question it. she didn’t overthink it. She just… believed it was possible. So I did. I started building something I’ve carried in pieces since I was in high school. Old notebooks, scattered thoughts, songs, memories… things I’ve never really known how to explain out loud. And for the first time, it felt like someone actually got it. So I got to work. Writing with a baby asleep on my chest… voice notes, typed drafts, music playing in the background… piecing together old memories with new ones. And I love it. I really do. But if I’m being honest… I started to wonder. Is this meaningful? Is this worth the time? Is this something good… or just something I want? And more than anything… I wanted to know if it was something God saw as good. Not just something that looked meaningful… but something that was. So I sat down, quietly, and I prayed. And I said, “God, if this is something I’m supposed to keep building… if I’m on the right path… if this is your will for me… please just show me. Give me a sign.” And I paused… because I knew I couldn’t ask for something easy. I had asked for butterflies before and blue jays have been unusually common in our backyard lately. I needed something specific. Something I wouldn’t just brush off. I looked over… and saw this little pink and white poodle sitting on my daughter’s shelf. And I laughed a little and said, “Okay God… show me a poodle.” almost sarcastically thinking… well, this one’s going to take a little more effort. But of course… Not even 48 hours later, we ran into Burlington. We were just there to grab socks and shoes for my toddler, her sandals were bothering her. Quick in, quick out. We ended up wandering a little. We’re headed to checkout… and my husband steps down an aisle, picks something up, and goes, “Okay, I know this is ridiculous… but we need this for the office.” And he had no idea. Nothing about my prayer. Nothing about the poodle. I’m barely paying attention yet. And then he turns it around. It’s a painting. Of a poodle. Not just a poodle… a poodle in a full business suit… sitting at a desk… reading a newspaper. I just… stopped. A business professional poodle, for the office we’re building together, a space where I can write. Like everything in me went quiet for a second. Because of all the things in the world I could have asked for… of all the ways that prayer could have been answered… it was that. I remember thinking, smiling, fighting back tears of joy… of course it is. Because I had asked for something specific. And apparently… He has a sense of humor. Also, just to make sure I didn’t miss it… because let’s be real, God definitely knows how to show out… the very next place we went… was Petco. And there was this real poodle. Then again. And again. Every aisle I turned… I kept running into it. And that feeling came back. The same one from before. Quiet. Certain. seen. beloved. Lindsey… Thank you so much, you reminded me to ask. You reminded me that God doesn’t just hear us… He answers. Not always in big, overwhelming ways… but in ways we’ll recognize. In ways that feel personal. Specific. Sometimes even funny… like they were meant just for us. And Lindsey… I just want you to know how much I appreciate all of what you’re doing. Your energy, your humor, the way you show up so fully as yourself… it matters more than you probably realize. You make people laugh, you make motherhood feel seen, and you bring light into spaces that can feel heavy sometimes. But there is also so much more than that… God really radiates through you. In the way you speak, in the way you encourage, in the way you remind people to keep going and to keep believing. It’s powerful. And it’s beautiful to witness. What you’ve created with “get your pink back”… that message, that reminder… it’s reaching people. It’s lifting people. It’s giving something back to women who feel like they’ve poured everything out. And that matters. It really does. I’m so grateful I came across your video when I did. And I’m really looking forward to everything you create next… especially your writing. You’re doing something good here. Keep going. Please never stop casting your light into the world… it really does break through the darkness.
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