Every morning, my husband and I walk the shore. We usually head north toward Asbury Creek, or what even-now-I-am-not-certain might be Shark Creek. I have a map from decades ago and those creeks flow in other places.

So we walk north. We almost never go out in rain, but we can see the rain shadow coming. Some days we when know we will get wet, we walk anyway.

We recognize people on our walks, Tammy, “two-dog-man”, Larry, “the owners” (Gary’s name for the people who think this is their world and we merely live in it). There is the man who fishes the surf. Two friends from the north end we only meet when we cross that creek. Other people we know slightly or whose dogs we know.

Mostly, it is in the summer that we talk to visiting walkers. We wait for the tide to reveal sand or a shower to pass by, and then out we go. We pick things up and strangers ask us what we are picking up. If that is the question—What are you finding?—the answer is easy. We gather trash. Plastic bottle caps, spent fireworks, candy wrappers, shovels, abandoned beach toys, bits of nylon cord and plastic rope in blue and green and yellow and red, some thin and others thick as a baby’s wrist. We find toothbrushes and insulating foam, plastic cups, cigarette butts, and broken white spoons. Golf balls and grocery bags, crushed clear bottles and broken take-out containers. We find other people’s trash and we gather it. Too often these days we find a film of diesel on the sand, seasonally we find purple sailors or plankton.

If they ask us: What are you looking for? The answer might be different. We find limpets and scallop shells, pumice from Mount St. Helens’s explosion in 1980 still floating, smooth flat agates and quartz crystals in milky clear and gold and orange, and—best of all—what we are looking for: bits of glass from cobalt to pale green and clear. We find beauty.

After Yeti died last summer, we visit the Oregon Country Fair and drive the coast and make quilts and weave and garden and paint our bedroom ceiling to floor and then the rest of the upstairs floor, we write and listen to music and make our own, and we sort file cabinets and books and thin our possessions since nobody wants any of it. We have over twenty people visit in August, and that is a little crazy but important too. Jan does NaNo again. Gary is loving Estonian choirs, Jan cannot seem to stop teaching, and Gary takes care of the house.

We find life.

 

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