Live razor clams

One evening in May, the tide being unusually low, we walk across the Cove barefooted for the first time. Clean sandbars decorated with sharp wave-formed ridges challenge my mollycoddled winter feet, but just when I’m starting to get used to the rather unsympathetic massage, I step on a sharp object: a live razor clam.

Although there are always empty razor clam shells strewn about the beach, I’ve never seen a live clam. Tonight there are dozens! The feeding tubes poke out 1-2 cm from barely visible shells, and when I touch one, like magic it sucks itself down into the sand and disappears.

A razor clam is an elongated saltwater clam that lives in the intertidal zone and is described as resembling “a closed straight razor” (the shaving weapon used by barbers in former times). They are edible and no doubt delicious, but I’ll leave them for the seagulls. What’s so amazing to me is that, in forty years of living in the Cove, this is the first time I’ve seen live razor clams in the sand, and I may never see them again. 

A little boy and his mother pass by, the young lad shyly holding his bucket out for viewing: “Crab looking at me.” “So it is!” (The crab is dead.)  

The tide yet receding, we wade through rivulets rushing out to sea and watch millimetre-thick tubes of “sand mason worms” bending and waving in the current. The worms’ durable constructions are built out of individual grains of sand glued together with patented mason worm cement, allowing each mason lanice conchilega to safely pop out its fringed head and dine on minuscule water-borne particles that come a-drifting by. 

Enough shore life. Time to put shoes on and head home, past fat olive-green catkins drooping from birch trees, forsythia blossoms quivering in the breeze, and violets peeking out from secret corners. The honeysuckles are ready to bloom, raspberry canes are coming up in places they don’t belong, and tiny perfect flower buds are forming on the currants bushes. Stand aside: life coming through! 

In the garden, radishes, peas, lettuce and spinach are up, and the flavourful leaves of lovage (tastes like celery), sorrel (lemony) and dark green dandelion (mildly bitter) have become major salad ingredients. The rhubarb will clearly be ready in time for the Rhubarb Social, an annual dessert fest that rhubarb lovers dream of all year. But before that big celebration of spring can happen there’s the Perennial Sale down at the park. No time to lose! Every spare moment is spent potting everything pottable: daylilies, irises, pansies, chives, Johnny-jump-ups. 

With our brilliant blue seas and sky, our tilled red fields full of possibilities, lemon-green leaves of hedgerow and forest, bursts of color from tulip plantings in every yard, and sweet-smelling lawns freshly mowed and trimmed to perfection—why, we have it all. 

We also have nasty Asian ladybug-beetle look-alikes and potholes and stoppages on the bridge, but let’s not think about those things. The razor clams are saying hello! Let’s grab all the special clam-spotting moments that come our way and run with them.