Today, Thursday, I did something
I haven’t done in a long while, actually more likely years. First, my walking
partner, Kathy, and I ordered food from Ono Poke. This restaurant is owned by a
former Hawaiian who opened the restaurant because he couldn’t find good poke
here…it’s absolutely delicious. After we picked it up, we went to the Edmonds
beach, sat at a picknick table and ate our lunches. It wasn’t sunny, but it
wasn’t cold and the breeze wasn’t too bad.
Once we’d eaten our lunches, we decided that rather than
walking the path, we’d go down to the beach and walk that instead. This is the
part I hadn’t done in a very long time. We may not have walked the thousands of steps
we usually do, but we spent way more time walking. And of course, we did not
have the proper footwear for an extremely low tide. Still, we persevered and
walked a long way south down the beach. It was probably one of those tides
where we could have walked from Edmonds to Richmond Beach. We didn’t do that.
Kathy had spent a lot of time on the beach as her children
went through elementary school. She’d learned a lot. My only time on a beach
with elementary aged children was when my son was in fifth grade or thereabouts.
My son’s teacher’s parents had a place on Hood Canal. Every spring, she took
her class to the canal. I was one of the
chaperones and drivers. For some reason, when I did that sort of thing, perhaps
because I had male children, I was given the more troublesome kids.
There are only two things I remember from that trip aside
from my group being a bit more challenging. One is finding a perfect moon snail
shell which I still have. The other is illustrating to my kids how not to hold
a crab. Somehow, I managed to pick up the crab in such a way that it grabbed
one of my fingers with one of its claws. As I was trying to educate my group, the
crab‘s other claw managed to grab another finger. All I wanted to do at this point was to shake
my hand and utter obscenities at the top of my lungs…it was so painful. Somehow,
I managed to not do that and was able to rescue my fingers from the crab claws.
“And, children, that is how you DO NOT WANT to pick up a crab.” My fingers were
extremely sore and ended up quite bruised for almost a week.
Yesterday, Kathy was much more knowledgeable about what we
were seeing than I. If I had her knowledge at some point, I’ve since lost it. I
did find another moon snail yesterday and it was alive. Kathy carefully took it
and placed it into a more wet environment. When we were on our return walk, we
found it again. It had a pile of sand around what would have been its foot or
face(?), so it had burrowed into the sand. Since we’d seen a seagull feasting
on another moon snail, I carefully covered this one up with seaweed. Hopefully,
since the tide was now coming in, it survived.
Kathy also pointed out a number of sea anemones. I wouldn’t
have spotted them otherwise. I loved touching them and watching as they pulled themselves
closed. Kathy even touched one that sent
up a spout of liquid…I told her it was trying to pee on her. We also picked up a number of interesting
rocks, some of which went into our pockets and some of which we left on the
beach. I even brought home a piece of
what I think is redwood. It’s very colorful and has some holes in it. I’m
wondering if there’s anything living in those holes. For now, it’s on my deck.
Once it dries out completely, I’d like to include it in the mobile for which I’ve
been saving driftwood for years.
A few days ago, the Shoreline Journal had an article about
a very low tide. I was sorry I hadn’t known about it. When I got home
yesterday, I looked up the tide charts for the next month. It appears there will be low tides the next
few days with a few more the middle of June. I sent the information to Kathy in
an email. Hopefully, we will return to
the beach on one of those days, clad in the appropriate footwear and wearing a
backpack so we can carry home far more treasures than we did today.
Maybe we can even order more poke…it was delicious!!!
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