Coming back from my run on this morning, I saw a crow standing well out on the shore in about an inch of water. I gave the bird a bad time about that. “What are you doing out there? That’s not your place. You don’t belong there.” The crow was indifferent to my chiding, but I went on a bit more. “Get in here!” Then the crow turned her head and I saw her red beak and realized she was a black oystercatcher. I had to apologize.

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Later, a massive flock of seagulls passed offshore, heading north, and then a second flock. I approached the front window, I spotted more birds already further north. Altogether, perhaps a full quarter mile of flocking seagulls flying north.

We watch the shore on our morning walks. We walk, admiring at the horizon, the sky overhead, the coast range where the sun rises. We watch the shore underfoot, the basalt rubble, the high tide line where we find a lot of plastic. As we search a miles or three, we gather. Mostly what we pick up is litter, many hundreds of pounds over the course of a year, a measured half ton in 2019 alone—literal tons of trash over the past ten years. What we most hope to find is sea glass, but we notice everything. We pick up trash and pretty things.

Mom got me started picking up baby sand dollars years ago. Fully grown and alive, sand dollars are about four inches across, deep purple, and covered in short spines like coarse velvet. They aren’t sharp spines. I crossed a cove in the Salish Sea during a minus tide when I was a girl. The sand dollars were wedged into the sand like slices of bread in the middle of the cove and I stepped on the edges of hundreds without doing any of us any harm.

Once the animal inside dies, the spines fall off the gray shells, and sunlight turns them pale, nearly white.

I’ve been gathering shells from the beach my entire life. It is a habit, a comfort, and all about memories. I have bowls of different limpets, and other shells. There are baby sand dollars stashed in half a dozen places—a few beside the sink, more beside two windows, lines of them on window ledges. They don’t make me cry, but the little shells remind me of my mother.

Mom was visiting without the dogs or my dad. It was probably in the 1980s, though that’s guesswork. She came in from a walk on the shore so very excited. Her hands were piled with little sand dollars, all less than an inch across. She claimed never to have seen them before, which seemed odd to me since she spent more than three months here from the time she was born and right through till she was grown. Anyway, we went out together and gathered more sand dollars, over two thousand of them, best I can recall. We covered the top of the picnic table and then the benches on each side.

Mother’s Day is this Sunday, and because Mom’s birthday was the 11th, it sometimes fell on that day. This year her birthday is the next day, Monday. She would have been 101 years.