The first thing she does is dig a hole. She hasn’t even taken the time to remove her shoes, to dig her toes in the sand and feel the sandpaper grains scrape against the arch of her foot. Soon, however, I know the beach will be littered with her cast-off belongings: balled-up socks, dusty shoes, an inside-out jacket flung absently across a bleached log. Her focus is singular and as she digs a flush begins to bloom in her cheeks, the pink slowly spreading across the bridge of her nose and up to her temples where damp tendrils of hair spring into curls that stick to her forehead. The sand is in her eyebrows, in the hollow at the base of her throat, coating her forearms like a pair of silver opera gloves. She smells the way I remember smelling: salty and immediate and alive.

My grandparents watch from their nesting place on the patio wearing wide-brimmed hats and sunglasses. They cradle iced drinks as they sit and watch us, soft flesh spilling over the sides of their weather-cracked plastic chairs. Our surprise visit has unlocked something inside them and I can’t remember the last time I’ve seen them this happy. I float somewhere between the beach excavation project and the old couple, and I catch pieces of their conversation every now and then. They speak in tongues- the language of shared remembering. They laugh about the time they almost lost me in the water. They laugh about the time my uncles tried to row to the other side of the bay. They laugh at something funny my mother once said. They ask if I remember eating sand.

The hole is finished and my daughter has found a log that looks much too large for her to maneuver on her own, but I can see by the deep groove in the sand winding down the length of the beach that I’ve once again underestimated her strength. She pulls the log as close as she can to the edge of her hole and then drops it. It hits the sand with a muffled thud, one end jutting out over the opening. She upends it, holding it in place with wiry brown arms as she uses her feet to tamp the sand down around the edges. She lets go and it stays in place, taller and wider than she is. She nudges it with her foot and when it doesn’t move she looks over at me and tells me she is hungry.

Macaroni and cheese from a box, paper plates, green grapes. Grampa sneaks her handfuls of fat, moist jellybeans when he thinks I’m not looking. When I was little it was Hot Tamales, spicy little cinnamon bullets purchased in bulk at the grocery store. He would pop one in my mouth when my mother’s back was turned, the red-hotness of it exploding on my tongue like Independence Day, then give me some to hide in my pockets. I would find them at bedtime, sticky and coated with sand, and eat them in the secret darkness under my covers. In the morning, my fingertips would be stained pink and my lips would still be burning.

Outside, the air has done that thing I can never explain– the sudden switchover from daytime to evening that happens only when you’re not looking– and everything is sherbet-colored. Fishing boats have gathered on the flat, silver mirror of the bay, seeking halibut. A group of Japanese women trudge by carrying plastic grocery bags full of wide, black-green seaweed. They chatter quietly and brush sand off of the hems of each others’ pants. Gulls circle high above the water, white wings against a sky whose color I can’t begin to describe. It’s yellow and pink and hazy all at the same time, like Black Hills gold. I should start gathering up our things; if we don’t leave soon we’ll miss the ferry. But the earth is so quiet, the day fading like a slow exhalation, and I am drawn back down to the sand. I sit down and my daughter appears beside me. She burrows under my arm and we both watch in silence as the mountains on the other side of the water darken in front of the setting sun. After a few minutes she reaches down and picks up some sand with her thumb and forefinger. She rubs it between her pinched fingers until it’s gone, then picks up more and does it again. Listen, Mama, she says as her hands move. Scritch, scritch, scritch. Do you hear that? Scritch, scritch, scritch. My fingers are a cricket.