Suddenly sprouting from dry backyards one or two, even three in late summer, pink as cotton candy or pink as face powder naked ladies along sidewalks we’re driving past brown pelicans floating in an airy solution the waves on the shoreline like crashing cymbals that make us look, look up higher, more sunburned as mermaid fairies on a beach littered with sand crab skeletons and whips of kelp before the rays recruit our blankets shiny as a puff flower ready to blow away in the wind
I watch my granddaughter’s graceful alliance of muscles as she takes first steps rising on all fours, a sort of down dog but without a stretchy ache, a limber salamander, all those months at ground level doing her own joyous crabbing, but for one moment, she stands on two legs balanced along the curved ripple marks of sand, a mountain range she wants to cross, no metronome of fear with the glossy ocean volcanic rock spectators cheering her from the background, and in one quick move, she arrives at the sand’s gelatinous valley, inches forward sees the next hill as a band of pelicans curve toward her and write a note in the sky.