By the Beautiful Sea

Our room was in the basement and the windows looked out onto a forest. It was quiet so I slept late and I was surprised to see sunshine slicing through the blinds. When we’d arrived the afternoon before, the fog was rolling in from the ocean and the temperature was dropping, dropping, dropping, but it did not last. By morning, the sky was bright blue and the air was warm. We ate a huge breakfast of bacon and blueberry pancakes and yogurt and fruit salad and lots of coffee and then, we rounded up towels and kites and distractions for little boys and we wandered down to Seabrook Beach.

I can not remember the last time I was sunburned on the Washington Coast. While I am mad about this place, just mad about, I know it more in its mossy and gray state, when it is wrapped in a wet woolly mist and I am wrapped in big wooly sweaters. But this time I shed my shoes and walked right into the Pacific, into the low waves edged with foam lace.

The low depressions in the sand held water from the receding tides that had been warmed by the sun. There were little bubble volcanoes from clams burying themselves, and whole crabs, meal sized, turned upside down on the black sand. We helped the two little boys launch kites; just spreading the kite wings and letting go was enough, the slippery fabric leaped into the bright sky. I put sunscreen on my face but not on my legs and my knees and shins turned bright pink on the south facing surfaces.

When we had eaten our share of salty beach snacks (and failed to drink our share of water) and lost interest in digging with a yellow plastic shovel, and covered the backs of our legs with black and gray sand,  and petted a handful of unknown dogs on the nose after shooing them away from the blue and white beach towels, and looked through little binoculars at ships on the horizon, and gossiped about marriage and work, and said, “It’s totally okay to throw sand around, but do it about ten feet THAT way” a dozen or so times… when we had engaged in the kind of lethargy that a perfect beach day requires, we shook the sand off the towels and zipped up the backpacks and headed back up the hill to slather moisturizer on our skin and conditioner in our hair and to take deep naps, the kind that are a direct result of salt air and sunburn.

The next morning there was no sun, so we stayed in bed even later, until the noise from upstairs told us that people were moving around. The sky never quite burned off the way it did the previous day, which saved us from the necessity of spending yet other day baking on the sand. Truly summery days on the Washington Coast are rare indeed, I can think of three other times during my nearly 20 years of residence here that I’ve taken off my shoes and wandered down the beach barefoot on a mirror of wet sand. We’d have been obligated purely by the novelty of the weather to face west again, to badly apply sunscreen and to the restless sleep of sheets on tender pink sunburn.

At home in Seattle, a bird has taken to visiting the gutters outside the bedroom window at the earliest sign of daylight. I hear his pointy little feet scratching on metal at five, half past five in the morning. I am wired to wake up early so his activities mean that I start my days at his whimsy, too early for even my likings. In the beach house, our forest facing windows did not allow any sound in and if there were birds, they were up high in the treetops, away from my sleeping ears.

I like the bird in the gutter even while I’m annoyed with him; it’s funny that he wakes me. What could he be doing there that is so important that it can not wait until seven, at least? The fact that I can hear him rustling around in there means that it is summer and the windows are open. My sunburn is summer too, itchy and dry and temporary and quite rare in this part of the world that is mostly fog and shadow and gray green trees that reach for the light. Summer is short in the Pacific Northwest and I like the fact that I am a little bit sunburned, just for a day, before I go back to living in the usual gray mist.