A Walk About

I thought I was getting a picture of the rattle snake bushes which stand tall and hide among the sea grasses. I have no idea what happened to my camera, and this picture looks like a roll of wall paper waiting to be used. It was the end of our trip and now I have to find out what went wrong. I love my camera and would be lost without it.

Canadian Geese or??? Not the usual birds we see around here. Marge in the driftwood.

I had no idea there was a minus tide when friend Marge and I decided to run away at eight o'clock of a Monday morning. The fog was thick in Brookings and showed its gray misty tendrils, sometimes thick hiding the trees and views of the ocean, only to clear bright for a few miles of highway, then find ourselves enveloped in the misty shroud hiding all from view all over again. I wondered if we were going to be able to walk the beach where we hoped to find some agates.

Our first stop was the coffee shop where the huge huckleberry and peach scones sat in their pans waiting to be devoured. The case is filled with sticky buns, donuts and other delicious pastries but the scones beckon and I had a berry one and Marge a peach one which we both swore one topped the other, all the while knowing each was perfection in itself. I thought of asking for the recipe but know better as I'd be baking them daily and spreading like a gigantic balloon. Why oh why are pastries so delicious and tempting?

A minus tide allows the freedom of the ocean and a chance to walk out to the huge 'hay stacks' as the humongous rocks erode slowly in the sea. The tide pools are filled with tiny sea creatures and the rocks themselves covered with mussels and other shells.

Marge never did put her camera away, even when filling her bag with rocks and shells. The wind was up and disturbed her usual 'not a hair out of place'. Who cares when one can have an adventure and follow a gaggle of birds we had never seen before. There were rings around their necks and they had a lot of color to them, not unlike seagulls in size, but bonded together with two standing guard as they slid into a tide pool and swam a short while as I stood there with soaking wet socks and shoes having stepped into a small tide pool that looked like a thin mirror on the sand.

There are many folks who build fires on the beach and enjoy the late hours of the day. We saw piles of driftwood and one that looked like a giant tepee. Marge climbed up into one sand hill where the sand slid easily and her balance was lost in the effort to get back down to the hard sand. She struggled for a minute to stand up and remove herself from the mound to find that her bad knee felt better. She was laughing and thought maybe she had found a cure. I thought it might be fun to try her 'cure' but knew if I floundered in that huge pile of loose sand I might still be there as it would take a derrick to pull me out. The strange thing is that even with bad feet and legs walking on the beach doesn't hurt a bit. Well, it didn't while we were walking for miles, bending and stooping like the very young, only to find later that we 'slightly' over did it and found sitting down doing absolutely nothing was a good ending to our day.

So today, the second day of your new week, remind yourselves that in another short ten or fifteen years you will be retired and you can plan a walk on a beach. We didn't find an agate of note, just sugar agates that sparkle in the rock piles, but rocks of every kind were ours for the taking and I have a new dish full on my little table on the porch. Some have pictures in them and I see all kinds of things. I may take a pen and trace them to see what really is looking back at us when we walk on the beach. Make today a day to remember. Hugs to all.