Waves, flags, shells—and the open hand of God
This morning my daughter brings shells from the edge of the surf: three, identical and tangerine orange, two, pale and small as a baby’s fingernail, one blue like a robin’s egg. She runs back toward the water, and I know she’s gathering them for the cookie tin in her room. “My nature collection,” she calls it.
She is six years old, and whole versions of herself have disappeared, ephemeral as summer fireflies. But her disposition is constant. She still runs everywhere, dances too, laughs with her entire body.
She has my grandmother’s name, one that means flower—although it’s her grandfather she resembles now. He too keeps tokens from his adventures, scattering his driveway with stones from his travels—Israel to Iceland, Vietnam to Greece, Turkey to China. When we visit, we pull into his driveway to the crunch of global gravel.
Later she stands in the surf, arms outstretched, speaking into the wind. I can’t hear what she says, but her words are big, declamatory, emphatic, like the waves crashing around her. She knows about danger—“Bad guys are real,” she tells her sister—but this is how I think of her: meeting the world with joy. Like when she hears thunder and heads to the door with umbrella and rain boots, or when she walks our neighborhood in a superhero mask and cape. Or when she finds glass stones in our yard, left by previous tenants, and treats them like marvels fished from the hand of God Himself. They go in the cookie tin too.
Unlike my daughter, I’m distracted. Behind us, beachfront flags pop in the wind with threatening colors: purple for dangerous marine life, red for high surf and strong currents. Earlier a woman asked if we had seen a blond-haired, eight-year-old boy with a black swimsuit: “Crew is his name.” We spread out and walked the crowded shore. He returned in tears, having wandered too far down the beach, but soon he was playing in the sand again.
Cocooned in gauzy unease and paternal worry, I try to see the beach as my daughter does, starting with the colors. The red flag is like a flame riding corridors of air. Or maybe a message of hope, flying atop a castle keep. The shells are like the orange, pink, and blue t-shirts my children wear sleeping next to one another, freckled and dreaming, at the end of these long summer days.
And from the shade under our tattered umbrella, I enjoy the slurry of sights and sounds—the rhythm of the waves, the warm sand at my feet, the sheen of summer light over everything. Then I feel something closer to visceral, primeval time. “Once below a time,” says Dylan Thomas.
When my daughter returns with more shells, I hold my arms out to greet her. It’s a gesture of gratitude for this very moment—as if fished from the hand of God Himself.
Robert Erle Barham is Associate Professor of English at Covenant College in Lookout Mountain, GA. He is the deputy editor of Current.