Low tide

The afternoon low tide brings families to the Cove, happily encumbered with folding beach chairs, striped umbrellas, airy beach tents, heavy picnic coolers filled with icy beverages and egg salad sandwiches, potato chips, plastic shovels and buckets, huge towels featuring palm trees and cocktails, wide brimmed hats, flip flops, beach shoes, sunglasses, swimming goggles, balls, Frisbees, dogs, babies, and floaties. 

It’s a challenge to get everything down to the beach and claim a place on a sandbar that will stay high and dry for a few hours, for we are granted only a brief period to relax on the ocean floor. Low tide to high tide is 6 hours and 12.5 minutes, and sandbars are under water much of that time. 

We have a tide clock with two big hands, one showing the 24-hour solar cycle (the way we tell time), the other hand displaying the 24-hour 50-minute lunar cycle. This device is very handy for people who live near the shore and you might like to get one yourself. Or you can just go to a website that tells you the tides.

Back to the beach. Having taken up residence on a sandbar, with babies happily sitting in warm tidal pools and older offspring running madly in all directions, parents can finally stop and relax. Troubles, what troubles? We left them all on shore. 

“Don’t go out too far on those floaties,” Dad cautions, adjusting his ball cap and flipping the tab on a cold beverage. There’s no danger today. The children are in shallow water between sandbars, the breeze is out of the south and the waves are gentle and forgiving. The real danger is the hot sun, but Mom has basted her darlings like chickens with the strongest sunblock money can buy. 

Having no responsibilities I am free to walk across the Cove and observe beach life. In shallow pools moonsnails spread their translucent feet, searching for shellfish to devour. Ring billed seagulls feed silently on brine shrimp and barely look up as I pass by. Crisp tiny turrets of tunnel worms crumble underfoot. A lone seal lies half submerged on an invisible shoal. 

The sand is deeply ridged in attractive patterns that echo the shape of the waves, offering an expensive foot massage for free. 

A young couple strolls by, shoulders and arms accidentally touching, and I watch until the magic moment happens and they’re holding hands. Was I once that young and hopeful, that slender and bewitching? I must have been.

Everything is calm, perfect, and temporarily under control. A bowl of fresh strawberries sits on the counter at home. We have a plan for supper. The lawn is mowed. The remnants of Hurricane Beryl will bring rain tomorrow, but right now I am surrounded by life and possibilities. 

The tide comes in and one by one the sandbars disappear. Children are rounded up and brushed off, floaties are deflated… and in a few hours you’d never know anyone had been there… except for a tiny pair of yellow crocs forgotten in the parking lot… and one blue plastic bucket floating out to sea.