My life has been like a run away freight train lately. I am working day and night to make enough money and time to visit my mother in the hospital in Florida before she dies. My freight train is racing with death.

I am learning many lessons on this break neck train ride. I am changing without resistance and with some acceptance. I am valuing silence more and the chance to be alone in nature swimming after a brief jump from the train to my little heaven of a pond.

One morning, this past week  I went swimming across the pond and just when I reached the other side, I saw a young deer swimming, only the deer head above water making a stream behind. Nature provides awesome and comforting companions that bring joy in a silent communion. We were both swimming in the early morning, the only swimmers in the pond.

I need to start more of my days at the pond. I need this kind of solitude now. I am able to gather myself in rhythmic strokes and breath. I keep breathing although I have had moments where I want to cease. I want off this train to know a peace that carries no freight, to know a lightness of nothing.

Instead, I'm still carrying this load and the train is careening and barreling on through the pass. I need to entertain myself on the train so I might play a solitaire for amusement. The solitaire game is called, "anything goes" including my mind.

The other day, for entertainment, I decided to play this game when I got an email from one of my real estate listing clients. She needed help taking a canoe off her truck. I thought the two of us could do it but she insisted we needed a man.

I was in the Naples office until 5 pm that day but I told her I would find a man and be over after work. When I left my office to go to her lake house, I still had not found a man. Between the office and her home, I had a 10 mile drive to find a man along the way.

I was cruising for a man. I pulled into a parking lot on the other side of the street from a vintage car rally and scanned men. All the men looked out of shape and I didn't want a lawsuit on my hands when a man put his back out trying to move a canoe. I drove out of the parking lot and down the road still in search of a man.

I was only a quarter mile from my client's house and still no man. Then to my right, in another parking lot, I saw my man. He was hugging a woman goodbye. I had driven by him but I turned around to go back and ask him for help.

I drove into the parking lot as he was walking to his car and I called to him and then, when he came to my open car window, I asked if he would help me get a canoe off a truck. He said yes and that he would meet me around the corner at my client's home. People are helpful here in Maine.

He was very kind to help my client and me unload the canoe and carry the canoe to the lake. When I told my client that I saw him in a parking lot hugging a woman, he said that the woman was his wife and they had just come from a marriage counseling session.

I told him that I hoped me picking him up to help with the canoe did not give his wife the wrong idea. He said, "It probably helped."

We all laughed and I'm glad that I could return a favor. I like to be helpful too, and spontaneous, jump from freight trains,  swim in nature, and play anything goes.