A Girl With a Sword

everybody at the beach

Hope and I went to the beach yesterday (just to clarify, Hope doesn't live with me, but she lives in Augusta, which is just an hour away). It's been years and years since I spent a day at the beach. We got there just after noon. We went to Isle of Palms, which was great (it wasn't this deserted, I think this is a winter picture),

The day wasn't too hot and the tide was going out when we got there, so by late afternoon there was a long, warm tide pool and and sandbar before the real sea began. We played in the waves for a long time. I wanted to swim farther out, but Hope told me there were sharks in the waters around South Carolina, something we didn't have to worry about back in the Tyrrhenian. When she said that I turned around and looked out at the water. I saw a black fin, but I thought it was just my imagination, then I saw two fins, then a dolphin jumped out of the water. There was a whole group of dolphins (a pod?) and they seemed really close. They played there right in front of us for a few minutes, and I kept jumping up and down in the water to be able to see them, and then they swam out to sea. It was amazing to me because I was reading A Ring of Endless Light all day, which is all about dolphins, L'Engle dolphins, which are the best kind and have names like Ynid and Basil and Norberta.

Hope and I spent a lot of time reading and a lot of time floating in the tidepool. We discovered that if you lay still in the tidepool you could float, inches above the sand, and have your ears underwater so it was like being weightless in your own watery world. I also realized that one of my favorite things to do at the beach is to dive into the breakers, just as they're about to hit me, so that the water rushes past me really fast and it's like flying and being completely out of control, but it happens so fast it's alright.

We left the beach around seven thirty and we realized, especially when we got home, that if you want the sunscreen to actually go on your back, you should not ask Hope to put it there. Yeah, it looks like she was making little designs on my back with the sunscreen, maybe writing her name or drawing birds. It looks cool now, but it won't look so cool when I get skin cancer. I guess I'm kind of to blame, too, though, since my arms and my stomach also have strange designs on them. Maybe I need to start buying that colored sunscreen. So I have been drinking water today like it is . . . I don't know, water? and I feel better. Weird dreams last night. I think they were more from my book than from the sunburn, though. It's so hot today. I might have to think about turning on the air conditioning soon. I hate air conditioning.