Honea Express

Posts Tagged ‘beach’

The day starts earlier than I want it to. It always has. But there is sunshine now, and that makes it easier. The coffee is nearly gone by the time I walk downstairs.

I’ve had two beers in three weeks. It has made my shorts too loose at my waist. I find an old belt and make a mental note to buy a six pack on the way home. The freeway is covered in marine layer and suckers. The same songs are still on the radio.

The days are long. The money is short. Life is that guy with a roll of quarters hidden tight within his fist. You know the one. The asshole. The punches leave you silent. The change is his for the keeping.

The past few weeks have been a lesson in panic. More than one conversation ended with us living from our car. Our credit is crap. Our dogs are on the list of breeds unwelcome. My once sweet income now wet and shrinking, shrinking.

These, we realized, are not the dreams we’ve been looking for. They are the nightmares that caught us.  They are flying monkey wrenches and so many bananas in the tailpipe. We fell for it.

But we never gave up.

And so it was we found a place to hang our hats and assorted headgear. I’m fitting it for a shingle. We’ll likely keep our hearts there. The sound you heard was our laughter in the distance.

From our new home I can throw a rock and hit the ocean, but it would probably take me an hour. Twice as long if I use my left. Rocks are easy to find. It would be easier to walk towards the beach and pick a stone at random. Things are where they are for a reason, be it tides or circumstance. My hands are calloused chance.

Seagulls chase every throw into the sea. They know nothing but hope and hunger. I am barefoot in the sand, and I leave my burdens behind for them to feast upon.

There is a home on the horizon and it waits for me.

I do not need to see the paint to know it is there — a fresh coat of white where once grew the notches of their youth. Memories written in pencil tend to be erased, and those are the things you never like to think about. It was a trace of them, and it is gone.

The boys grow here, too. There is sunshine and warmth and toes sinking in sands ever shifting. The waves crash upon their laughter, and the boys wave back with salt-soaked smiles. Their hair is soft in strands of gold. Their shoulders brown and growing broader.

Somewhere in an overgrown garden are the fruits of their labor. Tiny leaves spring from seeds once carried home in love and paper cartons. They have been set free and forgotten — something new for countless raindrops to fall upon. They will grow and bloom and nobody will ever know that the boys were the ones to place them there. Only the roots will remember.

Here the ground is hot and it rolls towards the horizon. The boys are shouting as they run across it. There are paths worn in the hillside and their small steps keep the tall grass always parted. Rabbits dart, birds flock and the boys sing songs made of their own device. They glow in the midday sun and their brows glisten accordingly.

Such is the way of chapters closed, next and those being written. We have left pieces of us, some by chance and some with purpose. For example, there are places in the glen where our voices softly echo, and there are stories tucked away to tell when such things are needed. One is about an old dog asleep forever beneath the cherry tree, and it should be told fondly with just a hint of tears. Others are filled with countless bottles growing light and rather quick to empty. They should be told loud and often. We left all that, and a spot of quiet that wasn’t always so.

These are the things that fall from your postcard.

Inland was warmth and sunshine and days of summer stretching wearily. The coast, however, was 20 degrees cooler and worked in so many shades of gray.  The sky fell into the sea and the waves rolled across my cold feet before running up the stairs to take their place at the end of the line.  Clouds waited patiently.

The rocks in the ocean were the size of ships, and ships were the size of small birds flying off in the distance.  There was a cave on the beach and in it sat a family around a campfire.  Their dog ran free and happy, a green ball held tightly in its mouth.

She stopped in mid-sentence, her words lost beneath the beat of a tide rolling in.  I hadn’t been listening.  I was writing poems in my head as I am prone to do, and then promptly forgetting them as that requires much less effort than actually writing them down.  Most of them were rubbish, but one may have been damn near perfect.  I watched her watch the ground.  She was brilliant against the sepia shore.

She bent down and picked a drop of red out of the surf-trodden sand. It was a ladybug, caked in grains and left for dead.  Suddenly, the beach was alive with polka-dots in reds and yellows and the polka-dots were, in turn, covered in dots of their own.  We sat on our knees in the sand and dug ladybug after ladybug from their collective coastline grave.  Our shoes, which had long ago left our feet and become something meaningless to hold on to, became the soles of rebirth. It was on the bottom of my left flip-flop that one ladybug found breath and another was once again able to crawl.  It was somewhere opposite where my big toe would be that a ladybug shook the sand from its wings and flew away home.

It seems that they live in the trees that tremble from the side of steep ocean cliffs, and when certain winds blow the way that certain winds do, the ladybugs are pulled from whatever life they have known and dropped without warning over deep waters and hungry fish. Assuming they don’t drown, are not eaten or lost at sea, they are marooned on beaches not 50 feet from the trees on which they started.  But they are pounded with ebbs and flows, and they are forgotten amongst shells and bits of seaweed.  All in all, it’s no way to treat a lady.

And so we gathered those that we could and we carried them on flip-flops covered with newfound meaning to a piece of driftwood just below the tree line. The ladybugs wandered aimlessly and probably thought things about mortality and what to make of second chances.

Every so often one of us would say how much the boys would like this while the other would nod, skip a stone or stare out at the sea. They were on a different beach in a different state looking over the same nothingness and the endless everything. Our day was a glass half hollow, half lined with romance. We played the percentages.

Then we walked back across the beach, our shoes once again empty, our feet still cold and bare.  We passed big rocks, small ships, a family around a fire and a dog with a ball and the constant need to wag.   Our car was waiting for us, and beyond it a green forest and blue skies and something pretty on the radio.

We got sand everywhere.