In Which We Wander On the Beach

In the early morning stillness and sunshine we wander on the beach.

My daughter and my niece and I.

We take pictures.

And the girls get silly and my niece proclaims “I am a crab,” in a falsetto tone and we laugh and I snap pictures and remember all the times, my teenage friends and I pulled stunts and laughed ourselves silly.

And Mr. Pelican flies close and I capture the moment. All the week, I’ve loved watching these pelican birds as they soar and flap or plummet towards the ocean in a divebomb landing.

 The girls do more posing and I get to do one of my favorite things ~ take pictures.

And we catch sight of a few ghost crabs still out and about.

 And Renae is wearing her dolphin flexi, because could there be a better place to wear it?

We write in the sand.

 

 

And I become a teenager again.

And I write too.

And I pose for a picture, just like I did many years ago, on an Oregon coast.

Younger then. Sixteen then. Just like my niece is.

Younger, thinner, teenager. In love with my young man. And I wrote the same words then, as now. And somewhere there is a photo I had printed and sent to my guy in Kansas.

I meant it then. I mean it now.

Special then. Even better now.

My niece writes too and I photograph for her.

She loves music and she loves Owl City.

We dip our toes in the surf and we breathe deep and we find a few shells.

Because certainly two unspoken rules of the beach are these:

You can’t go to the beach without………….

getting wet

and

collecting shells.

We start back towards the boardwalk that will carry us back to our beach house and a bit of breakfast.

We leave our writings etched in the sand to be smoothed away by the surf, but we take our laughter and our photos and our memories home.