If you’ve been tapping your paws wondering where I’ve been, I promise I didn’t fall asleep on the delete key. I traveled with my mother to the beach. Before this, I had only been to the neighbor’s yard and to the park down the street.
My mother said I could splash around in smelly water, sniff for stinkbugs, and hunt for sand crabs.
She put my favorite things in a suitcase. My brown teddy bear, my cuddle blanket, and my tennis ball. I dropped my sunglasses in there too.
When we got to the beach the air tasted like salt, the wind tried to get into my ears, and the sand followed me around everywhere.
While my mother read her book and watched the waves, I tried to hear stories from sea creatures.
There were stories in seashells and seaweed, in gull cries, and in starfish. I listened carefully and tried to remember what they said.
There was a seahorse in a shallow puddle. He looked scared and like he had a story to tell. I listened while he told me about the big wave that carried him away. And then the other waves that brought him back.
I also saw things on the beach that looked mysteriously like punctuation. A shell shaped like a comma, a piece of seaweed that looked like a sentence, and a stick that seemed like it could draw words in the sand.
When we got home, I was pretty sandy and tired, but I was full of salty stories.
It was time to wake up my keyboard.
I loved it!