The brown and white border collie pulling its person with all its might along the walking path and the person stopping to tell me her dog is actually a good walker but simply excited because they’ve rounded the corner that means the beach is just there… which is where they play ‘stick’. The dog is still pulling on its leash like crazy and you can practically hear it saying, yeah, yeah, they don’t care, let’s go already!  And in an instant they’re gone.

The ridiculously ideal stone skipping conditions of the day and the question:  why is stone skipping not an Olympic event??

The seagull that keeps flying past when I’m not looking and by the time I point my camera it’s miles away and I swear I hear it chuckling with its pals.

The people who walk by deep in conversation about how someone recently found a piece of blue and white crockery washed up on the sand, smooth as beach glass, and which may very well be from a pirate ship. (Because what other possible explanation could there be??)

A ginkgo leaf three hundred miles from the nearest ginkgo tree.

The way you never feel entirely alone in the company of trees.

 

Abandoned things that are litter.

And abandoned things that are not.

And abandoned things that are maybe litter…

or maybe secret codes for travellers.

And, best of all, sitting on warm sand surrounded by ten million plain stones and spying a single black one with sparkles that reminds me of every sparkly stone I ever found on every beach when I was a kid and how I was convinced they were diamonds (and still kind of am) and how I was stunned that no one was as excited about this discovery as I was.

And I still kind of am.