Years ago a friend who was visiting us looked at the shore and thought he was seeing soap suds or another form of pollution. It is, in fact, life. A heavy surf and a plankton bloom combine to make seafoam. There has been a great deal of it onshore this month.

We have been experiencing some “interesting” weather. Temps dropped down and there was snow in the Coast Range. Fortunately our son had already made plans to take vacation days to stay home with his daughter last week. We no longer drive in snow when we can help it.

Here the wind gusted to strong gales and we walked the beach anyway. High surf erodes the shoreline in some places and we find raw agates released by the tide. We get half wet day after day, pick up dozens of plastic water bottles, and the usual plastic bits and bobs—over 60 pounds of trash so far in January.

A puffin died. We find dead seabirds on every walk. This one would be opened and the entrails and breast muscle eaten by the following day. It is our first dead puffin and so particularly sad, but seabirds die every day. And there is black oil all over the sand too. Crude oil? Someone illegally emptying bilge at sea? We can’t know.

Last week we watched the helicopters flying south fast to the next beach and we knew this meant something bad. Emergency Fire and Rescue, the EMTs, three sheriff’s cars all with lights and sirens. Two young children drowned near our home. It didn’t seem quite right to mourn a puffin.

When I tried to warn a couple about the tide—they laughed when their dogs ran into the ocean—the man said “we know.” Their dogs don’t know. The next wave swept up a hundred yards over the sand and drove us, dogs too, all into the rocks.

People think they know about sneaker waves and “king tides” but they don’t. We have lived here over forty years and keep an eye on the ocean, move up shore when the surf becomes silent. (The crashing is usually safest—the sound of outgoing and incoming waves meeting. A sneaker wave is quiet and swift.) We spent most of the last week walking on the basalt rocks because even at low tide, waves swept all the way in, higher and higher. We watched waves sweep up over our pathway through the hedge, nearly to our yard. It is fascinated from the safety of our home, but we go out whenever we can. Not so very much glass has shown up, but pumice and plastic, those agates. Drowning. Death.

Lately we’ve walked the “inside” path on roads when waves swallowed sand and basalt rock whole. It’s safer than risking the shore. We often get rained-on during our walks, but we never head out into a heavy downpour. Yes, we have rain gear, and yes, we get caught in drenching showers. We see them coming but do not deliberately head out into a rainstorm. These things just happen.

• I have set goals for quilting and weaving on Ravelry. At least 16 items for the Hoffman, one completed the other day as a gift. I have chosen yarn for a warp and I did (yes, I did!) cut that narrow warp clean through. I will chain it off my loom today and maybe begin winding the new warp. I wound off the skeins yesterday and chose possible weft. Everything is from my stash plus a huge skein especially ordered from Koigu in December. These blues are not my colors, but for a friend who retires in a month so I need to get cracking on.
• Zero clothing purchases so far this year (yeah!). I have ordered seven skeins (plus another five mohair/silk skeins that I returned because the color was wrong and I do not have time for that much knitting), tea for Gary, a book.
• No new writing, but I withdrew work from two journals that failed to respond to queries after holding my piece for months past normal response time—one had a piece for months before shortlisting and since has held it for another year. Yesterday I submitted a revised essay to an unlikely journal with a history of quick responses. So I worked on that and sent it off. I mean to allow my Duotrope folder to go empty. That goal can’t happen for at least another three months. On Submittable, the new submission has already shifted from “Received” to “In Progress.” Two older ones have not.
• The manuscript, Butterfly Fontanelle, occupies my thoughts on most days, but I have not opened the file in a while. Where does her protein, salt, oil come from? How does she store food? How does she clothe herself? Does she need to create shelter? Does she stay in place or move? Why? The story has become a meditation.