Writ In Sand

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The ocean is a battleground. Walk along its verge and you'll see evidence of astonishing carnage: helmets, shields, and claws strewn about in great profusion, and all patrolled by gulls who feed upon the warriors' remains and sandpipers who seek out the conscientious objectors hiding in their sandy bunkers.

So it is strange how we land-dwellers to to so violent a place to find peace. Yet we do.

Once a year, Marianne and I rent a place "down the Shore" for a week. Every day, I go to the edge of the sea and, picking up  a stick or a bit of shell begin to write in the wet sand. A few words at a time, a sentence at most, get laid down before the sea comes up to erase them.

What I write is never long -- flash fiction -- and nobody sees all of it but me. And because it's wiped away before its completed, it never exists as a whole save possibly, briefly, in my mind. Where it is soon forgotten.

Every day I write and every day a little slower. Until by the end of the week I am content to sit by the sea and not write.

And then I can go home and pick up the pen again.

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