The children and I walked down to the beach on Tuesday evening. It had been grey, grey, grey since we arrived, and this made the water look grey. The air had been still. It was cooler, too. Cooler than usual, cooler than North Carolina, which isn’t hard to do. It didn’t look like beach weather, and it sure didn’t feel like beach weather.
So we didn’t wear bathing suits. Before dinner, I announced to the children that we were going for a walk, and we all wore sneakers and socks in addition to our clothes, took an assortment of plastic pails and shovels, and went.
We went to Jake’s Beach, so called only in our family, so named for the boy we knew in the earliest years here, whose grandparents had a house just there, at the end of the lawn above the sand. And as we turned down the lane made of gravel and shells, on this grey, still, and un-beachlike day, I heard the wind moving through the trees with that glorious splashing sound it makes in the leaves, and I thought we might have something Other than what we expected.
The wind was blowing hard down at the shore, but not so much on the shore as in the trees, racing through the oaks that border the beach, combing their leaves back to pale green. There is no sound in the world I like better than this one. And the sun, too, had made its way through the clouds, so that now the sky was actually bright. The boats, moored here and there across the bay, stood as silhouettes against the water. I had to hold my arm before my eyes just to look at them.
We set our shoes, socks tucked inside, up on the grasses, and immediately the children were in the water in bare feet. I collected snails for them by the handfuls; if you wait long enough, they begin to squirm, sending slender feet out into the air or into your palm, looking for water. And in a cluster of stones, near an abandoned shell, I found a quarrel of little hermit crabs, threatening one another with miniature claws. We punished them by depositing them in a bucket.
Everett had begun to dig a trench, and we joined him. Bare hands, plastic shovels, a broken piece of clamshell, anything will do to scoop the sand and stones away. The water flooded in topped with brown foam, and the mound of wet sand grew. We worked hard on it, stepping away for only a moment now and then to find another hermit crab and drop him in the bucket. The digging came to nothing, of course. What does it need to come to? The tide was still coming in, after all, and it is good to dig just for digging’s sake.
It is good, also, to splash for the sake of splashing, and to get wet just because you can. The children were fully clothed, mind you, but who cares? It wasn’t long before the boys were swimming out to a lone buoy and Emma Grace was on her stomach in the water. I checked on the hermit crabs.
We had full-on aggression in the bucket. One poor soul (do they have souls?) with a rip in his shell seemed to take the brunt of the crabs’ ill-humor. Someone was forever attacking him, a claw lodged into the opening in the shell, as if hoping to divest him of his house. We rescued him by dumping him back into the bay, and scolded the others.
The wind continued to race over our heads, and I watched with just a shadow of envy a silhouetted pair on the deck of a sailboat. They didn’t appear to be about to sail, but they were On the boat. Presumably they Owned the boat, and were messing about on it there, just like you are supposed to do in the light of a midsummer evening, when the wind is making the line make that marvelous ringing sound against the mast. Back when my uncle had a boat, I had always enjoyed that.
Now we turned our attention to the dock, and walked out to the end of it. It is a floating dock, and we laughed at how it moved under our feet. Then Emma Grace and Everett began to jump off it where the water was shallow, and this was something they did again and again, running up the sand and up the dock and off again, laughing. They were all three covered with sand and salt and sand, dripping wet. We would never get the sand off our shoes.
It was time to release the hermit crabs. We punished their continued bellicosity by dumping them on the beach, then picking them up one by one to drop them with a plip into the water, where they instantly made off and away, weary of one another.
And we were weary too. It was dinnertime, after all, and we were hungry, and tired of being wet, of the sand in Absolutely Everything. But we were not weary of the sun, or the tide’s steady and relentless creep, not weary of the way the warm water enclosed our ankles like air, not of the wind frothing the trees, and certainly not of one another.
It is So Good, this: the beginning of vacation.
