I woke up this morning to the sound of children squabbling. There was sunlight coming in the window. Sweet, sweet sunlight. I hopped out of bed and started scrambling around for a bathing suit. It was still wet, cold, and a tad sandy. Just how I like it.Children donned their swim shirts and baseball caps. Sand buckets are permanently in the van, along with a healthy sprinkling of sand. There is also a straw hat full of shells that I’ve been meaning to take out of there for approximately six weeks. Maybe I will stop typing right now and remove it...unlikely.The small pink bag with fifteen granola bars was snagged, and I even remembered my purse that has all those inessential things in it—money, for instance. Water bottle and pants located. Done.

We got there just in time—an hour before the sun was ready to scorch us. The beach is being “renourished”, which means that the hurricanes stole our beach and now the county is going to pay some bulldozer guys to play with the sand until another hurricane comes. Benefits to this: weird tide pools. White foam explodes onto the sand bar, rushes forward into the three foot gorge, and thrust into bumpy little waves that send my toddler giggling across the shells. Shells, shells, and more shells to massage my feet.

Mr. Lifeguard was holding up his phone and I’m pretty sure he was taking a candid picture of a lady in a bikini. Slacker.

I made sand castles with the kids and collected about 5000 tiny shell pieces on my skin. It was a shelly kind of beach day. We played, and then I walked back to the van like a pier post coated in barnacles - one with the ocean.

We hit the highway, past sand dunes, restaurants, retention ponds, and pine trees, to the dairy farm. I licked my lips and tasted salt. I opened the van door, and smelled cow manure.

Here is an old friend of mine; a charming lady. She reeks of sour milk, and I love it. She has a stately way of tangling her horns in the fence and swishing her tail against the flies. Elegant, she is. A queen among heifers.It is necessity that I filter all photos of cows so that they look like something from my mom’s 1960s photo albums. It’s just a thing I have to do.And here she is, with a special focus on those golden eyes:

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