my life is a stroll
upon beach, as near ocean’s
edge as I can go

My life is like a stroll upon the beach,
As near the ocean’s edge as I can go;
My tardy steps its waves sometimes o’erreach,
Sometimes I stay to let them overflow.

My sole employment is, and scrupulous care,
To place my gains beyond the reach of tides,—
Each smoother pebble, and each shell more rare,
Which Ocean kindly to my hand confides.

I have but few companions on the shore:
They scorn the strand who sail upon the sea;
Yet oft I think the ocean they’ve sailed o’er
Is deeper known upon the strand to me.

The middle sea contains no crimson dulse,
Its deeper waves cast up no pearls to view;
Along the shore my hand is on its pulse,
And I converse with many a shipwrecked crew.

The Fisher’s Boy by Henry Thoreau as published in Poems of nature )Houghton, Mifflin & Co.: Boston , 1895).

In the movie, It’s a Wonderful Life, Clarence the Angel famously disproves the existence of George Bailey by listing all the forms of identification George no longer has.

Clarence says, “There is no George Bailey. You have no papers, no cards, no driver’s license, no 4-F card, no insurance policy… No Zuzu’s petals.”

I wonder what do we accomplish even when we carry those papers?

Our lives may be a rock dropped into a small pool (or a large one) where ripples on the surface have impact beyond out knowing.

But for ourselves?

I stroll the beach whenever I can.

As near the ocean’s shore I can go.

My tardy steps its waves sometimes overreach.

Sometimes I stay to let them overflow.

I will leave a trail of footprints to show where my feet have been.

But in a couple of hours, the tide comes and all evidence of me is erased.

So Mr. Thoreau warns to place your gains beyond the reach of the tides.

Along the shore, my hand is on the pulse.

Place your gains beyond the reach of the tides.

Keep Zuzu’s petals in your pocket.

It’s a wonderful life.

Christmas Eve Postcard:
having a wonderful time here
do not miss the snow

There was a time when I embraced the cold and the snow.

Grew up loving sledding and snurfing (snow boards before they became snow boards) and tobogganing.

Snow forts and snow ball fights.

Would stay out sledding on Crestview School hill until my hands were numb and when we got inside I would run the bathroom sink full of hot water and plunge my hands in to warm up.

No matter how many times I was told that didn’t work or that it made my fingers hurt worse, I couldn’t help myself.

As far as my fingers go, in winter, I picture poor Bob Cratchit in his scarf and coat, trying to warm his hands from the single candle that lit his desk.

Never got into cross country skiing but I enjoyed going out to Hoffmaster State Park and WALKING the cross country ski trails and thinking I was a Jeremiah Johnson type lost in the woods in winter. (Though there was that time I stayed too late and it got dark and got lost in the woods. I knew that Lake Michigan was out there and if I could get to the beach, I could find the walkway back to the parking lot. I made it but Jack London’s To Build a Fire was playing my mind).

Don’t get me wrong.

I get it.

But down here I was walking the beach in the sunshine.

Some kids (most likely from Wisconsin) were beach boarding.

I wasn’t getting out of my car and stepping into 4 inches of slush that went over my shoes and soaked my socks.

I wasn’t scrapping my windows.

I wasn’t worrying if my car would slide through the stop sign.

I wasn’t shoveling snow.

I wasn’t worried if I had gas for the snowblower.

I wasn’t worried that the pipes might freeze.

I wasn’t … cold.

I thought about how long I spent in Michigan winters.

50 of them I lived through.

I think that’s long enough.

Sometimes, I still don’t feel like I have thawed out.

Like I tell folks, Stalin would send people to Siberia … to punish them.

Anyway, Merry Christmas Eve 2025.

I am down here in the Low Country.

Having a wonderful time.

Do not miss the snow.

If lucky we may
witness a spectacle vast
elemental things

The shore means many things to many people. Of its varied moods the one usually considered typical is not so at all. The true spirit of the sea does not reside in the gentle surf that laps a sun-drenched bathing beach on a summer day. Instead, it is on a lonely shore at dawn or twilight, or in storm or midnight darkness that we sense a mysterious something we recognize as the reality of the sea. For the ocean has nothing to do with humanity. It is supremely unaware of man, and when we carry too many of the trappings of human existence with us to the threshold of the sea world our ears are dulled and we do not hear the accents of sublimity in which it speaks.

Sometimes the shore speaks of the earth and its own creation; sometimes it speaks of life. If we are lucky in choosing our time and place., we may witness a spectacle that echoes vast and elemental things. On a summer night when the moon is full., the sea and the swelling tide and creatures of the ancient shore conspire to work primeval magic on many of the beaches from Maine to Florida. On such a night the horseshoe crabs move in., just as they did under a Paleozoic moon — just as they have been doing through all the hundreds of millions of years since then — coming out of the sea to dig their nests in the wet sand and deposit their spawn.

From the article, Our Ever Changing Shore by Rachel Carson, in Holiday Magazine, July 1958 Volume 24 No. 1 as reprinted in Lost woods : the discovered writing of Rachel Carson, Edited by Linda J. Lear (Thorndike Press, Thorndike, Maine, 1999).