At first, she’s tiny, the size of a bucket, then soon my grief is everybody’s darling, a curly-haired toddler and into everything. The dirt.
The hydrangeas hang their faded bluish heads— my dozing mother, chin on her chest. The shade is sweet—I sit. It’s too hot to claim
lumbers out of the unwavering surf; claws, flipper by flipper, through wavesmack and tidepack; drags her girth up the struggle of shore; that vast