— unpredictable thoughts

After spend­ing sev­eral hours at the beach recently I saw the echos of hur­ri­cane Irene. She had torn up the board­walk for miles. Torn sid­ing and shin­gles off the sides of houses and build­ings and lifted sands to cover the dunes and their pro­tec­tive fences.

But with all this destruc­tion there was some­thing I hadn’t seen in quite some time on the shores that are man­i­cured for the long tourist sea­son. I saw nature. I could see piles of drift­wood; a wel­come nat­ural addi­tion that these days are almost impos­si­ble to find. I can remem­ber when we would build fires with this wood and stay on the beach long past dark. Some­times we would cook one or two of the fish we had caught that day.

I was able to sift through the plas­tic bot­tle caps that one finds now instead of glass word round by the sea to find some shells that had not been crushed to pieces by beach clean­ing equip­ment. I found small mus­sel shells mak­ing an ink spat­ter pat­tern on the wet sands.

Thank you Irene.