This is a November Day

Yesterday, on the other hand, was, I don’t know, just beautiful, with the sun striking all the newly rained upon, glistening branches — upward turning, weeping, swinging, outreaching, barely swaying, curled, and grounded — such that they added crystal to the light and sent it soaring, and swooping, and tinkling, and landing on puddles, ponds, rivers, and, happily for me yesterday and my friend, the ocean.

The ocean rumbling in, sushing out, rolling in, sliding out, gliding up the sand slope, knocking about slipping back into its whorls clams in their clay white shells, and deserted, or gull raided clam shells, black and opalescent mussel shells, and, I believe, chambered nautiluses–some dwelt in, tossed by the sea to the sand, awaiting the rising tide’s reach to touch them, pull them in, sustain them, interfere with gull and biped mammal (including us) predation.

The gulls, those ever hungry, every talking, and keenly sighted denizens of seacoasts flew, flopped, flowed, flung prey. The tiny avians–pipers, plovers, their parties–darted away before we could glimpse them, but they left their mark!

And the sandcrabs, below, breathing shallowly in this swash zone, barely to be known of but by their little blow holes. Sssh.

The dunes we crossed through to reach the ocean, the dunes delightfully protected from the likes of us by access from road/parking to beach to be only a raised, bannistered wooden boardwalk–one can walk slightly above, one can look and revel, but, happily, one cannot trample–the dunes were every shade of green, yellow, red, brown, and every shape of leaf, petal, blade, frond, stem. And sitting distant among them, high on a dune, posed a snowy owl, from where we watched, merely spherical white head and languidly blinking eyes facing us and the prevailing winds, safe and solid. I took no picture, only stood in awe.

The ocean was the blue that could be purple, could be forest green, could be the color of a bluebonnet, could indigo, could be as a sapphire, could be, I don’t know, lapis lazuli. So many and it was all.

I will not show my friend, because I did not ask her permission, but here I stand, binoculars in hand.

“In his hand are the deep places of the earth; the heights of the hills are his also. The sea is his, for he made it, and his hands formed the dry land. Oh come, let us worship…”Psalm 95:4-6a

I await each day, and wonder.