Should you

Should you sit by the seashore? Yes. Should you share the view with a companion ? Sure. Should you sit under a coconut tree? Hmmmm. 

Golden

A slender silhouette, still as a statue

A strip of silvery sand 

The sea, a molten pool of golden light

fresh and new

On the weekend, I stood on a rocky, reedy shore, and gazed across the mud flats of Boundary Bay. The tide was out and it was mud flats all the way to Crescent Beach and Blackie Spit. The sand stretched on and on.
A salt marsh separates the path from the sandy shore or I would have had my toes in the cool mud in a flash.
It's just as well I guess.
Here and there are patches of sunken sand, pulled down by some underground current; a sort of beach version of Black Holes.
Instead, we ambled along, admiring the bleached gray driftwood at winter's high tide line.
Ducks and songbirds chuckled and buzzed and pinged.
Butterflies zig zagged, white against the green.
The sun was overhead, but a breeze, the kind that is almost always the saving grace of a summer day at the seashore, blew til I felt fresh and new.

this one

When the tide turns and water drains from the beach, river beds are carved in miniature into the packed sand.

This one looks like mermaid hair.

keep smiling

If you ever feel the urge to flee your normal life on planet earth, may I suggest taking a ferry ride?
There is something irresistible about pointing your car in the direction of the seashore and watching your home getting smaller and smaller in the rear view mirror.
For many years, I worked close enough to a ferry route that I actually felt a pull like some huge magnet trained on my car.
Some mornings, I had to grip the steering wheel and make myself turn into the parking lot at work.
Heed the siren call I say!

Ferry Riding 101

• Get up at the crack of dawn regardless of what time your ferry sails
• Pack your bags or double check your packed bags or rifle through your packed bags looking for something that will be left behind anyway
• Over water your house plants
• Depart without a backward glance
• Feel your heart taking a few tentative gasps and begin to relax
• Admire the eagles circling above Ladner
• Smugly congratulate yourself on reserving a spot on the ferry
• Pull into the vast parking lot and find the right lane and drive down it and down it and down it
• Wind down your window sociably and fetch out your snack
• Listen stoically to announcement that ferry is delayed one hour
• Hasten to small patch of distant shade shared by all pet owners traveling in the same direction as you
• Have your own Best of Class dog show with your grandchildren and imagine names of all entrants. 
• Assign prizes for Largest, Littlest, Hairiest, Cutest, Most Obedient
• Disqualify Cutest for lifting his leg and peeing on his owner and her purse as she sits nearby 
• Respond to the crackling loudspeaker by hastening to your car as it smolders in a vast sea of smoldering cars
• Keep your thoughts firmly fixed on shade, seashores, surf and shells
• Smile
• Keep smiling

shows us

My granddaughter was crying.
Standing with cupped hands overflowing with hermit crabs.
Tiny pets.
Little friends.
How quick she is to love.
Ahhh, 'parting is such sweet sorrow.'
What is so sweet about the sorrow of parting?
It shows us where our passions lie.

ominously

"Ahhhhhhhhhhhh!" screams my tiny granddaughter. "Pirates!" And sure enough, out in the bay, rocking ominously at anchor, a sailboat with the Jolly Roger snapping in the breeze.

still summer

Summer slips through the fingers of August don't you think?
I had almost forgotten that feeling.
Children make you remember.
School age children.

With August almost in the rear view mirror, my daughter and my grandchildren and I  hastened to the beach yesterday.
The great wide wondrous beach.
Windy too.
I had forgotten how cool that wind can feel, like an air-conditioner on high.

We built smallish castles and my grandson studied the power of erosion by water. Great calamitous overhead water while his little sister joyously sloshed pailfuls into her castle moat like a bucket brigade gone mad.
Her big sister drew and drew in the sand, happily adding sea weed hair to a giant face.

We got all of the usual scrapes, chafes and contusions that are a necessary part of The Day at the Beach.
And we come home with a random assortment of stories that are also a necessary part.
Stories about more Canada Geese than seagulls patrolling the beach. Was there a seagull convention out of town?
Stories about little yellow crab apples arriving on the incoming tide. Dropping from the branches of a mysterious far away tree, leaning and laden.
And a sad story about a dead harbor seal. It looked like a very young one.

A train chugged past, bedecked in especially fine graffiti.
There were sand dollars and jelly fish.
Shells like tiny pink butterfly wings.
Special pebbles.
Sand molded by the waves.
Sand and sea and sun and surf.
Still summer.  

inaccessible solitudes

The Sound of the Sea- by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

The sea awoke at midnight from its sleep,

And round the pebbly beaches far and wide

I heard the first wave of the rising tide

Rush onward with uninterrupted sweep;

A voice out of the silence of the deep,

A sound mysteriously multiplied

As of a cataract from the mountain's side,

Or roar of winds upon a wooded steep.

So comes to us at times, from the unknown

And inaccessible solitudes of being,

The rushing of the sea-tides of the soul;

And inspirations, that we deem our own,

Are some divine of foreshadowing and foreseeing

Of things beyond our reason or control. 

my own heart

"Would you like to go the the story time at the Library?" I ask my littlest granddaughter.
"Yay!!" she says hopping up and down.
Thoughts of fun lead on to thoughts of even more fun it seems and she adds, "We go to the beach? I build a sandcastle?"
A girl after my own heart.

down by the sea

I love standing where the ocean washes ashore. I especially love standing there when boats plow past and leave a rising swell in their wake. A swell that races up the shallows and crashes around my feet.
Water pushing water.
Today I watched a leaf crossing the street. If fluttered across, just like a butterfly.
And in the wake of passing cars, dry leaves race across the pavement.
Wind pushing wind.
I never really thought of it before, this sameness of wind and water, but the words we use to describe wind are watery words. There are currents of air, the Jet Stream.....
And the words we use to describe water could describe the wind just as well;
Torrents, billows, mighty, rushing.
Even the sounds are similar.
Our home backs onto a busy street. The constant sound of cars and the wind they create sounds to me like waves rushing over a pebbled beach. Back and forth, back and forth. Even more so on a rainy day.
Makes me feel like I live beside a rocky shore.
Down by the sea.

mother of pearl

As we headed back over the crushed shell and pebbles towards the parking lot, my grandson dashed to catch up, a shell in his outstretched hand.
"Look," he called. "Holy Mother of Pearl."

on the sand

Tiny pink shells like butterfly wings on the sand,
barnacle encrusted oyster,
indigo and mauve mussel,
thick cupped, heavy ridged, speckled and freckled,
and here and there, shells the color of polished horse hoof,
shades of varnished brown.

adventurous times

A world of wonders is beneath your feet.
An entire civilization lies hidden.
When you walk a sandy stretch of beach they are all around you.
Sometimes you can hear them.
A hissing sound as you walk over the hard, wet, gray sand.
Sometimes a stream of water shoots up and marks a spot, like an x on a treasure map.
Dig here.
All you need to do is look down.
Down at your feet and as far as eye can see.
Under every hole in the sand are clams, clams, clams; Manila, Littleneck, Butter, Razor, and the giant Geoduck.
It's fun to dig for clams.
To pounce on a waterspout, and scoop up the sand until your fingers close upon the prize.
Geoducks are the most fun of all though.
Their siphons are often just at the surface.
Clam lips.
It can be a foot or more to where the giant clam lies smugly safe.
But mollusks are nobodies fool.
They feel the sand being thrust aside and retreat in a rush of water.
Sand is heavy and filled with broken fragments of shell.
Digging by hand can be perilous.
It's a sport of fools apparently.
Spurred on as I was by a reckless desire to show my grandchildren a giant clam, I plunged my hands into an ever deepening hole in the sand.
I could tell right away that the cut was deep.
By the time I pulled my hand to the surface, up through the slurry of sand, blood was everywhere.
I held my hand aloft and stared in amazement as red flowed down my finger and hand and began to drip onto the sand.
Good grief.
I was a bio-hazard.
You never have a hankie when you need one.
Have you noticed that?
I didn't have anything I could wrap around the cut, so I pressed on it with my thumb as we hastened towards shore.
It was low tide and we were at the waterline.
Of course.
A clean bottle of water was sacrificed and a kleenex pressed into service.
Then back to the beach we went.
The children and I disrupted the eco-system by feeding pretzels to the seagulls.
We gamboled and rambled and roamed and roiled.
Then raced for the truck and the parking meter.
We arrived breathless with two minutes to spare.
Adventurous times.

into summer

There it was, its wings white against the dark wet sand.
A small butterfly.
Somehow it had fallen and now had wings heavy with water.
I bent and placed my finger against feet waving in the air.
They instantly grasped hold and the little butterfly was soon upright on my hand, opening and closing gossamer wings in the afternoon sunshine.
I do think time stands still.
Just for a moment I think it did.
I can still see those wings so delicately patterned.
Feel the grip of tiny feet.
The breeze always blows at the beach and my granddaughter's hair was being styled by the wind.
I transferred the little feet gripping my finger to my blouse to free my hands so I could corral her hair into an elastic.
When I was finished, I remembered the little butterfly but it had caught a friendly current and sailed away into summer.

what in the world

This is a cropped detail of a larger picture.
Not much larger, but I wanted you to see the pencil lines around the figures.
I should erase them.
It's just that I thought of this picture as a practice sketch and haven't given it much respect.
It does capture a feeling of evening light though.
Warm summer evening light and love too.
But, what in the world is the woman wearing?

springtime by the sea

still singing

We jumped up from the supper table and thundered down the stairs.
Jacket, scarf, camera.......
My sister and I raced for the beach and the setting sun.
Hooray, the tide was out.
We were surrounded by sand wet and wide.
Sand rippled like the shell of a peanut, or cantaloupe peel, or like row after row of ocean wave cast in relief under our feet.

The setting sun stayed stubbornly behind a low bank of cloud but the water reflected a molten silver light.
Gray and silver all around.
On the boardwalk, people drifted by in pairs or little groups, snatches of conversation forming strange stories.
The air was chill and fresh.

As darkness crept near, lights went on.
At first, down the beach and then closer and closer.
The long wharf lit up just as we turned our backs to it and picked our way towards the parking lot.
Soon, fairy lights twinkled in the dark branches of the trees along the street.
I hated to leave.

Warm light and laughter and music were on the evening air.
We headed for the nearest shop selling coffee to go.
Ice-cream and specialty drinks, the sign said.
Warm light and music were here too, and laughter.
The ice-cream man sang as he worked.
Little snatches of jazz.
A swirl of ice-cream and harmony.
Back and forth he danced.
Singing and serving.

We were the last ones in line.
It was only then that my eyes took in the sign on the counter.
Cash Only.
Oh oh.
I had traveled light.

'Do you live nearby he asked?'
Well, no worry, I could pay when I was back that way again, he assured me.
He made a special drink for my sister. Carefully he swirled cream atop the steaming cup.
He urged me to try extra chocolate in mine, and swirled cream atop my drink as well, and then added more chocolate.
The twinkling light, the dark night, the music and kindness...we were surrounded and warmed.
He was still singing when we left.

sinatra by the sea

He was happy.
So happy that he sang as he worked.
He was a crooning Ice-cream man.
Dean Martin with a cone in one hand.
Sinatra by the sea.

squabble

The last tide had been so high, driftwood confetti lay in an undulating line along the walkway, as far as the eye could see.
The roaring sea was mist and spray and foam.
The wind seemed to push us down to the waters edge.
I pulled a plastic bag from my pocket and holding it aloft, allowed the wind to open it.
The air above me was suddenly, magically filled with gulls.
They hovered and dipped just beyond my outstretched hands, their sharp, dark eyes fixed upon my fluttering white shopping bag.
It was like a scene from Birds.
It was as though every gull above White Rock had drawn a bead on my bag.
"Mine, mine, mine." they screamed.
A squabble of seagulls.