“Shark!” She screamed. I looked around casually. I was fairly confident a great white was not going to get me in the six inches of water I was sitting in.
The ocean was very sleepy. I hadn’t seen it so calm in ages. I watched the little bubbles of sea foam meander back to their mother, with their bubble shadows trailing behind. The ocean was making a very soft spoken roar—quite different from its usual tone of voice, and quite a contrast to the girl’s. She let out a scream-yelp, something like the melding of an injured seal and an angry mermaid.
“The puppy got bit,” she said quickly in a calm narrator voice. It seemed she was transforming back and forth between canine and human, and it was happening so fast it was hard to grasp which creature was currently in possession of her. Well, until she got back on all fours and yelped pitiably.
“Let’s see the injury puppy—oh look, hardly a scrape!” I said as I released her hand/puppy paw. I looked out at the smooth line of the horizon, where blue met another hue of blue. We had planned to be sitting at the kitchen table knocking out the boy’s grammar lesson at about that time, but had decided grammar would keep better than a tourist-free weekday beach outing. I let out a satisfied sigh and thought:
This is why people homeschool.
Back at the Beach
The boy was building a sandcastle wall that extended all the way down to the water, as though to illustrate what happens when the ocean decides to remove a house for the sake of expanding its territory. I had talked the girl into building a sand nest for her stuffed dragon, where it would need to keep sand eggs warm. They were bound to hatch…eventually…possibly after we left. And I rested my back directly on the sand and closed my eyes.
Melt. Just melt into the sand.
If it had been July, this would have been accomplished immediately without any sort of metaphor, but being October, the sun was gentle. I felt my body relaxing and giving over to the earth. Until my ears pricked—literally, I can twitch my ears—in the direction of a voice a short distance off.
“The boy was runnin’ from the law,” a woman drawled. I had seen her and two other ladies sitting in beach chairs earlier. They looked to be in their eighties, with pleasant dispositions, and a constant stream of chatter flowing between them. This was nothing out of the ordinary—oh but the accent. You just don’t get a good heavy country accent like that very often.
Floridians don’t sound southern, in case you happen to not be from my little peninsula of the world. We are the southernmost state, and we don’t sound southern. And there isn’t much in the way of a country accent here either. Culture is interesting, isn’t it? Anyway.
“He was in a gang,” she said, and I’d never heard the word “gang” spoken in a way that sounded so un-gang-like. There was such a naïve sound to it. I needed more.
No, you need to melt. Just melt.
And so me and my meditation-focused inner-self melted again. We fell into the sand, like liquid. I was salt water, smooth and velvety, running through grains of sand magnified to boulders. Boulders that had no force to contend with my own. I rushed around them, bending and flexing and unbreakable. Back, back, back to the mother, faster and faster, sloping downward on an inclined plane of sand boulders. Sucked back to where I belong, and all the things I love intertwined there in the foam with me, us all rushing together in harmony.
“Hot damn!”
I opened my eyes. The lady with the floppy hat and the heavy accent had just used that phrase in real life—no one uses that phrase in real life—and I had missed the context. I must have been blinking rapidly, because the girl caught on to my alertness.
“When are the eggs going to hatch?” There was a hopeful look of are-you-going-to-play-with-me-now in her eyes.
I had the feeling my opportunity to learn about the hot damn had passed.
Back at the House
I sat in the dining room, cheek against hand, and elbow against table, entirely not melted. The boy was sitting in the chair across from me and swiveling his pencil about as though he was trying to hold it back from shooting off to outer space. The way it was moving, part of me thought it might.
We both seemed to have come to the unspoken agreement that the beach might not have been a good idea before school. I was groggy from all that melting and the draining power sea air seems to have on humans. The boy was just perturbed that we had messed with a very important and basic law of existence that all children live by—you save the best for last.
Doing the beach first and then grammar was like eating ice cream and then being served a bunch of vegetables for dessert.
“Find the verb in the sentence,” I droned.
“'Baked,'” the boy droned back.
“Find your subject—who ‘baked’?” Long sigh.
“'Sophie.'” A longer sigh than mine, just for good measure.
“Find your direct object—‘Sophie baked’ what?” Irritated snort because I didn’t have the lung capacity to beat his last impressive sigh.
“'Them.'” Double snort.
“Find your indirect object—wait, no, Sophie baked lasagna! ‘Them’ is the indirect object. Sophie didn’t bake ‘them.’”
The boy started laughing hysterically, far longer than necessary. I wasn't sure he was going to stop. I looked out the window, where the horizon line of one blue meeting another was no longer visible, but I did see a school bus drive by. I let out a dissatisfied sigh and thought:
I also know why people don’t homeschool.
The girl ran by squealing in delight. “The dragon’s eggs are hatching!”
"Well hot damn," I muttered as I got up from the table.