Dogs and sea glass

We had a nice weekend out on the boat.  The weather was warm but breezy.  It's unusual to have temperatures in the mid to upper 60's in February.  Even the plants are befuddled because the azaleas and the tulip magnolias are already blooming.  The hyacinths and tulips are coming up and budding.  Crazy El Nino weather this winter.

This weekend we took our newest boat dog, Amelia, out with us.  She is the daughter of our old girl that recently died.  Amelia is an English Labrador who seems to enjoy getting in the dinghy and going to shore.  Getting back in the dinghy for the return trip was not her favorite thing, generally resulting in my having to coax her to get close enough so that I could lift her into the boat.  She weighs about 80 pounds and would go limp when it was time to transfer her from the dinghy to the boat.  And that lifting was upward!  Whew, what a workout.   It may take several more trips before she gets the hang of it.  I am posting this photo next to her sleeping berth so that she will get the idea of what some dogs do.  Maybe this handsome Newfoundland will be her hero!

It was surely good to have some time to ourselves.  Having cheese and crackers for a snack, fixing pancakes on Sunday morning, flounder and Spanish rice for dinner on Friday evening--reminders of having good food after walking the beach for much of the day.  We found several nice shark's teeth to add to the collection and a beautiful piece of aqua sea glass.  I would like to have the sea glass made into a necklace for my wife.  Here is what I think would be creative and attractive:

Maybe it is something that I can create myself from the wave-worn glass that we find on the beach.  She is much more of an aquamarine spirit, than that depicted by a shark's tooth wrapped in silver.  The color of the sea becomes her, wrapped with thin strands of silver.  

Our weekend, however brief, brings to mind a poem by the sad but brilliant Sylvia Plath. 

Two Lovers and a Beachcomber by the Real Sea


Cold and final, the imagination
Shuts down its fabled summer house;
Blue views are boarded up; our sweet vacation
Dwindles in the hour-glass.


Thoughts that found a maze of mermaid hair
Tangling in the tide's green fall
Now fold their wings like bats and disappear
Into the attic of the skull.


We are not what we might be; what we are
Outlaws all extrapolation
Beyond the interval of now and here:
White whales are gone with the white ocean.


A lone beachcomber squats among the wrack
Of kaleidoscope shells
Probing fractured Venus with a stick
Under a tent of taunting gulls.


No sea-change decks the sunken shank of bone
That chucks in backtrack of the wave;
Though the mind like an oyster labors on and on,
A grain of sand is all we have.


Water will run by; the actual sun
Will scrupulously rise and set;
No little man lives in the exacting moon
And that is that, is that, is that.

And that for tonight is that.