This morning I went for a walk on the beach. I was staying at my parents’ place on a barrier island on the Gulf Coast of Florida. I only had an hour before I left for the airport to fly back to Santa Fe, after four days on book tour. I thought about running a few miles on the island bike path—except for a six-mile run on Key Biscayne, I hadn’t run at all this trip—but I didn’t want to pound pavement down the middle of the island. I wanted to slow down and see the water.
The beach is very narrow in front of my parents’ house, continuously shrinking. Tree branches poke out of the water where the water has come up, and passersby had hung shells from the branches. It was high tide, and I wiggled around the bushes, up to my shins, and crossed onto the wider part of the beach. It was empty, of people and houses, for nearly a mile. In the distance, a woman walked onto the sand. She carried a small woven bag and was studying the ground as she walked. Beach combing.
The island is famous for its shells, the beach littered with cockles and scallops and conchs, worn smooth and bleached by salt and waves. I looked down at my bare feet. Shells were everywhere, so many they blurred together; occasionally one jabbed at my bare feet. The beach widened, and low houses lined the shore. Three people walked toward me, looking down, each clutching a twisted plastic grocery bag.
When they approached, I smiled. Suddenly I wanted to talk to them. “What are you looking for?” I asked. This sounded dumb, obvious, so I rephrased it. “What do you look for in the shells? What makes you decide to keep one?” I thought there might be some secret selection criteria that serious shell collectors abide by. Otherwise, they’d pick up the whole beach.
One of the women smiled back. “Oh we just look for ones that we like, colors that catch our eye,” she said. I glanced at three cockles in my hand. I’d pictured bringing one home to use as a soap dish; it had to be big enough to fit a small bar, not chipped or full of holes. But which one would I choose? They all looked the same to me until I examined them more closely. Some had pale stripes, others darker; some were pink, others grey.
“Here,” the woman said, holding out her hand to reveal a small sand dollar, “have you found any of these?” When I shook my head, she offered me hers. “Keep it. We have an entire jar.” I took it, with thanks, and we drifted off in our different directions. It was nearly 8 in the morning and more people were wandering out to the water, heads turned studiously to the sand.
Kids are natural collectors. When my daughter was ten, she found a hundred tiny, polished sharks’ teeth on this beach. It’s far less common, though, to see grownups looking so carefully for something they haven’t lost but are trying to find. Walking so slowly in search of something they’ve seen a thousand times before but also never just so, before. Not one of them was on their phone; most walked alone, in silence. What they were seeking was free, washed by chance upon the shore, imperfect, natural.
I thought of the university library in Fort Lauderdale where I’d given a book talk two days earlier. I had forgotten about libraries! How soothing and quiet and calm they are, how still. The smell of books and low-pile carpet, the expansive silence, one of the last bastions of public quietude. How easy it is to breathe in a library! I wanted to sit down at a table and spread my books all around me like I’d done late at night in college, finishing a paper, but I had to give my talk. In the stacks, I ran my hand along the books’ spines: dissertations, research, esoteric tomes of all kinds. What mysteries might I discover that I hadn’t known existed?
After I walked back to the house, ate the egg my mother fried for me, and packed my suitcase, I placed the sand dollar the woman had given me on my mother’s kitchenwindowsill, below a jungle needlepoint her mother had made and beside small cockle, her wrinkled, well-loved copy of Joy of Cooking, and a tin recipe box she’d had since I was very young. You can tell a lot about someone by what’s on their windowsills. At her studio and house in Abiquiu, Georgia O’Keeffe lined hers with smooth desert rocks. Now I looked at my mother’s shelf with the same fascination the people on the beach had studied at the sand, really seeing— maybe for the first time—the treasures she’s spent her life collecting, that tell the story of her life.
Now I’m on a plane flying home from Florida, reminded as always that the brief flashings are all around us, always, sometimes flickering like pink neon signs on the Houston airport wall, other times camouflaged like sand dollars on a beach. I kept the biggest, smoothest cockle to bring home for a soap dish and left the others behind by the bench on the beach where my mother sits every afternoon. I know there’ll be more, like the flashings themselves. All we have to do is keep our eyes open, collecting them even as we let them go.
Brief Flashings book tour update!
Many thanks to all who came out to bask in the brief flashings in Florida! Special gratitude to Nova Southeastern University, Books & Books in Coconut Grove, and The Tide Books Boca Grande for hosting such wonderful events and championing my book!
Andrea Askowitz moderated a lively, soul-baring discussion of marriage, love, running and Brief Flashings in the Phenomenal World at Books + Books. If you haven’t read her memoir, My Miserable, Lonely Lesbian Pregnancy, get it! And be sure to subscribe to the podcast she hosts with Allison Langer, Writing Class Radio.
I also recorded a live webinar for Trail Sisters’ Speaker Series—watch here. I’m so inspired by Gina Lucrezi’s dedication to supporting the women of running.
Next up:
June 2. I’ll join renowned mountaineer and photographer Cory Richards on a panel at the Outside Festival in Denver on June 2 at 3:30 pm, discussing mental health in adventure, moderated by the amazing Florence Williams. Tickets on sale here!
June 5. Join me at Portland Running Running Company in Portland OR, at 6 pm, for what’s sure to be a blast of apodcast partay hosted by Another Mother Runner, plus book signing, food, goodies, and more!
Thanks as ever for your support, and for sharing and subscribing to this newsletter.
you are the flashings!
katie x
