Building sandcastles

04 July 2008

Fourth of July at the beach is the coconut smell of sunscreen, sand in your ears (and nose, eyes and hair), Grandma's giant bucket of licorice, and most of all my daddy's sandcastles. In our backyard we build tree forts, and on graph paper he sketches space stations, but on the Carolina coastline he turns sand into towers, walls and palaces: a fortress for an afternoon.

He started after breakfast. With the shovel and a few buckets-- "see, we'll carve out a channel here and the water'll sort of wash out to a delta over there... this hole we'll dig down to the water table and the moat can drain into here..."

A bridge, a tunnel, two fortresses with access roads, a giant hill in the dry moat-lake, and towers of drip castles on every level. Daddy took a lunch break, but just for a bit; low tide is the very best time for building.

He looked a bit like a kid out there, kneeling in the middle of his piles of sand, patting down the walls, and dribbling up the towers. I built up the battlements, the guard hills and towers. Jack got knighted Head Castle Protector and helped dig out the moat. Sussy and Brigham picked shells for decoration and the neighbors came by to stare.

"Will it be there tomorrow?" the little boy asked.

"We'll see." said his dad.

"Not a chance." I promised.

About dinner time the tide rolled in, just like it always will, and we finally stood back from our masterpiece and watched it slowly melt.

"You know, I was thinking we should've set up a camera and made stop-motion clips of it washing out."

"I was thinking the same thing! But we should show the whole thing build up first and then wash out."

"There goes the first bridge!"

"Yeah, didn't expect that one to last long"

Daddy chuckled, "Nothing's supposed to last long— it is a sandcastle."