Rain rain go away come back another day!

My best friend and I went to the beach last Friday. It was a bad day for my beach combing but turned out great for her as she found the most sea glass and some of the largest pieces I've ever seen. The light was buttery and watching the vast ocean with the gulls screeching overhead somehow quiets the noise inside my head. Oh how I love to traips around on the beach, preferably barefoot with my hair windblown and tangled, my skin drawn tight by the salty air. I watch patiently for the fin of a dolphin and follow the path of a distant sailboat. I walked again later and admired the sand dunes, sculpted by wind and waves, their faces raw and steep. On their inward side, sea oats, lavender-flowered morning glories, pennyword and other hardy deep-rooted plants anchor the dunes, keeping them stabilized. Farther back stand older, precipitous dunes, their sand as soft as talcum powder. Nestled beweeen the dunes are meadows of waving grasses and sedges, green, golden and brown like a woven tapestry beckoning seed-eating birds, rabbbits and other small animals. Little seaside sparrows and marsh wrens build their nests in the waving expalne of cordgrass. I could sit in my beach chair for hours and watch quietly, without moving and still as the dead, the the shore birds scavenging for lunch--gulls, terns, willets, oyter catcher, sandpipers, plovers and occasionally an endangered piping plover. The sandpipers run back and forth with the retreating waves like they're afraid to get a toe wet. They scurry like little ghosts across the sand, probably for tiny mole crabs and multicolored coquina clams. I long daily to feel the touch of a clean ocean breeze and the wet kiss of the rain, to hear the ocean's roar.


The following photographs were taken after a rain shower, they are plants that thrive near my front door, greeting all those that come here.