This Familiar Beach

There is time and there is the sand that runs through your fingers as you sit on this familiar beach. There was a time when your eyes watched closely over these same sands as your children ran down to the sea and across to rock pools full of the life of this new world for them to discover.

Now those children have gone away to walk the beaches of their own lives, leaving you here to watch the waves falling over each other in their own hurry to claim this beach for themselves.

The tide too, though, will turn and those waves retreat back into the folds of the sea, leaving the beach deserted, and the children’s running footprints washed away as though those days too have long gone.

You come to the beach not to bring those days back, but because you know the sea can always answer those questions we ask about the transitory and the eternal; just by the way it drags itself up these beaches, and back again, every day.

So you walk down to the edge of the sea to leave it some more, new, footprints for it to erase the next time it returns, and you know, deep down, that will be enough.