the beach was bordered on the shoreline with a substantial barrier of seaweed, the intense bright green bushy kind with berries that looks like something you'd buy in the garnish section of hobby lobby. this seaweed had also been pulverized into most of the sand, discoloring it and changing its texture. where i had remembered soft, duny sand there was now a hard sandy surface. it took me a while to assimilate this change and accept the fact that the beach had changed. as i looked at the little kids running around i thought, "they think this is the way the beach is supposed to be." then i thought of myself as a kid and how someone older might have been sitting on the beach when i was running around and they were probably thinking, "he thinks this is the way the beach is supposed to be." for me then, as for the kids now, the beach was perfect just as it was. nothing to compare it to. after i processed all that, i relaxed into the scene a little better and it became less alien.
yet another jarring development was the warmness of the ocean. i can't remember ever walking into an ocean that felt like warm bathwater. but the gulf felt that way this weekend. it wasn't really unpleasant, but again, it wasn't what i expected or was used to. it seemed just a little wrong.
despite all my comparing the present to the past, david and i floated in the water and sat on the beach having a perfectly lovely time. also, we visited my aunt and uncle, who live in rockport, and that was really nice.
1 comment:
Since the beaches erode naturally from storms and surf, occasionally it is "reclaimed" from the water and pumped back onto shore. That's what they do in South Florida. Sometimes the sand is brought in from else where too. For a while after a reclamation there is very little in terms of crabs and little guys burrowing in the sand. Eggs have to hatch and a new brood has to come on shore. And the sand is never the same.
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