A walk on the beach

posted in: Life and things | 1

We went for a walk on the beach on Friday morning. It hasn’t happened as often as it should, I guess – but then, we’ve been busy in the garden, moving a mountain of mulch, painting, repairing edging, pulling out plants and sometimes planting them. And that all happened as we cleaned up the home unit after Peter’s brother’s death.

Waves wash across a sandbar that will have disappeared in an hour or two

The beach is a lovely place to ground yourself, to forget about all the unsettling things happening all over the world. Every time we go there it’s the same but different. The main arc of the bay is always there, but the sea might be flat calm or ruffled or even a little bit rough. Sometimes we see lots of birds but on other days, like Friday, we hardly saw any, to the extent that we remarked on it. Of course, that was when we spotted a few seagulls and an ibis and – oh look – a cluster of cormorants gathered on the exposed reef. It wasn’t until we came home and I looked at my photos that I realised there was a Brahmani kite on the rocks, as well.

A seagull admiring his reflection
The Brahmani kite is the white-breasted bird sitting nearest the left margin of the picture

You might think, judging by the apparent cloud cover that it was a bit gloomy but the cloud was high and fairly sparse and the sea shimmered silver.

The crabs are another constant, processing the sand for dinner and depositing the leavings in wonderful, complex patterns around their holes.

Crab art. These dot patterns never cease to fascinate me.

Right about now we would like some of the rain that has fallen just about everywhere else on the continent. It’s raining on the rock (Uluru), which doesn’t happen all that often, the Wet has started early in Darwin, and there’s flooding in Victoria. We’re in a La Nina pattern, so we should be getting more than average rainfall this year. That was certainly true in September but we’ve had a dry couple of weeks, so we’d be grateful for a chance to get out of watering.

Stay sane and keep safe, everyone.

Last light on callistemon flowers

  1. Linda Hayward

    You are soo lucky to have a beach nearby where you can walk and de-stress. Mindfulness and all that.

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