Hard to imagine a more perfect morning; mild, gentle wind from the southwest, wide beach, firm sand made for walking.  Everybody we met was smiling and had something to say about the morning.  It had that kind of effect, an atmosphere of soft acceptance and grace that just put you in a good mood.  Run of dead jellies and crabs apparently over.  Sand fleas starting to show; the small ones.  Won’t see the whoppers until July, the ones that make it that far.

Sea Foam

Nothing on the beach but birds and these sea-foam sculptures.  They are intricate structures of millions of tiny bubbles adhering to each other, through surface tension, I guess, making extraordinary kinetic works of art that sway in the breeze and, in the first low rays of the sun, glow with an inner light, each individual bubble illuminated and defined, like little rooms.  Also known as spume, which sounds deeply suggestive of the ocean’s relationship to the womb,  it is created when sea water containing high concentrations of dissolved organic matter is agitated, trapping air in bubbles, which then gets blown around.  So there.

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One of our correspondents recently wrote in with a brief anecdote about coming home to find her young dog engaged in digging to China, which got us thinking.  Many years ago, when we was but a young pup ourselves, we heard the term, were intrigued, and decided to give it a try.   Now this may be hard to imagine, but we were a very serious child, and everything we took on was done with deadly earnest resolve, whether that be playing Hopalong Cassidy, or digging irrigation ditches in the sand, or eating every other row of an ear of corn.  We lived in Tampa then, Santiago Street, on a corner lot.  The lot sloped to the street on the west side, maybe two feet of elevation, which seemed an immense uncharted steppe to me, and a perfect place for the North American terminus of this dig to China.  Unsponsored, I nevertheless I acquired a shovel from the garage, and went to work.  Focus is everything, and I remember a particular myopia about this venture, my little arms aching with each shovel-full I lifted from the deepening hole, the Florida sand clinging to the sweat on my finely tuned little torso, but the goal firmly in mind.  My only concern was not with language or cultural difficulties I might encounter, but whether I would be upside down when I finally emerged.  Two hours in I had made significant progress, which is to say I had gone down about three feet, and then my mother appeared, and none too happy.  Seems some concerned biddy of a neighbor had called to rat me out.  So much for community support for industry and international relations.    I was made to curtail the dig and fill in the hole.

With that in mind we have encouraged The Baby in even the slightest proclivity for digging on the beach, but thus far he shows only fleeting and infrequent interest.  We believe that will change when he develops a larger world view, specifically that China is clear on the other side of the world, and that digging there from here is not only a worthwhile endeavor, but a family tradition.  He seems serious enough.

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