tides kerry i woke up this morning with a funny feeling. itchy, antsy, restless, but not sure where to go. so i went back to china beach. the sun came out as i arrived, and there were people swimming in the water, despite the sign at the top of the cliff: PEOPLE SWIMMING AND WADING HAVE DROWNED HERE a man was feeding a baby at one of the tables by the abandoned bunker and a white-haired woman dressed in black was perched on a rock, perfectly still. between two boulders a man was fishing and the tide was coming in. walking around on the dark sand i found a bone, a vertebra, stinking and the length of my middle finger. a seal's, maybe? i took a video of it, a long one, only stopping when the water nearly reached the tips of my shoes. like watching time pass, watching the world turn. until recently i never really understood my mother's love for the ocean. 210901 ... kerry a video of the tide, that is. though i took a few pictures of that bone and considered cleaning it up and taking it with me. is that gross? 210901 ... unhinged (no that's not gross. i found a bleached skeleton with kelp tangled around it on the beach last summer and also took a pic, also wanted to pick it up and take it with me. but i contented myself with a bicolored piece of driftwood and some pretty pebbles i was picking out of the water along the shoreline) he would check the tides and take me to the cape hatteras lighthouse early in the morning during the low tide so i could fill my five gallon bucket. i still have a mason jar full of wampum and a beautiful whole black conch shell from that beach, decades and an entire continent away. 210902 what's it to you? who go blather from