I wish I had had my camera.  I wish I could draw well and fast.  Instead, I’ll have to try to give you the picture in words.

It’s a really hot day on the beach.  The elements are all doing their elemental best to claim the day: sand, air, sun and waves.  You have to yell to be heard above the pounding of the surf, and the tide is rising fast, claiming sneakers and chairs and sand pails faster than their startled owners can drag them in.  One dad gets a bright idea to stave off the loss of his space by building a sea wall, and digs a fortification in front of his family’s umbrella: a deep hole with a wall on the side to the ocean.  Suddenly kids from all over have gotten into the act, digging and fortifying.

My boys ran down with their cousins to join in.  Parents came, too, and we built drip castles all along the line of the wall.  And the wall held against the tide, giving the umbrella people another forty minutes of time before the hole behind the wall filled with fresh cold sea water, and the children went from castle-builders to merfolk, dabbling in the pool they’d created and covering themselves with yellow foam.

Gratitude List:
1.  Family time at the beach
2.  Mama Ocean
3.  Watching Joss devour every kind of seafood he could get his hands on: clams, flounder, shrimp, scallops.
4.  Coming home to Jon
5.  Myotis lucifugus, the little brown bat.  The first one to roost in the barn we called Otis because it seemed more likely that a solitary bat would be male.  The friend who was roosting with him today we will call Lucy, in hopes that they might be a breeding pair.  Fly well, small ones.

May we walk in Beauty.