Off the Cuff / My Other Journal

Straggling in Spring

Spring where I live is a farce. It is the tomfoolery of the clownish calendar frolicking with Florida. As soon as April shows up on the checks we write here, the major one to the IRS, we are roughhoused into summer like a whole ball of wax to melt under the subtropical sun’s ninety-degree rays.

Yet, there is a bright side to this, aside from the too bright sun. A Monty Python song says, “When you're chewing on life's gristle // Don't grumble, give a whistle,” and I whistle to the seagulls on the beach even though I have always refused to chew on any gristle.

Walking by the beach is what I do as my nowadays pastime after April springs in with its scorchers. This is so unlike those years of the past when we lived where there was civilization and I started saplings and dared to put them in the soil ahead of the Farmer’s Almanac’s prescribed time.

Being on the beach, in other words nearness to the ocean, is desirable now because, at my age, I don’t like bending for things popping out of the soil, and also because I don’t want to come face to face with an undesirable snake while bending. No matter how much of that smelly snake repellent I have scattered around the place, snakes--some poisonous--abound here from April to July, which means, I don’t want to stink to a snake or to anyone else either.

Walking on the beach is my choice activity because it is easier to do nothing by the ocean. This isn’t for the romantic waves whispering to me, but rather for the wantonness of the entire experience or my loafing there that is so appealing. Where I usually hang out is not a private beach, and to my knowledge, no one has ever been arrested loitering on that beach, only because everyone loiters there.

The beach I choose to loiter in is neither a nude beach nor it is a place that emits to the mind lofty thoughts, starting with “a grain of sand.” In the first place, on a nude beach, I’d stick out like a sore thumb, with or without clothes. Actually worse, nothing philosophical or poetic ever happens to me by the ocean either, as it has happened to Sylvia Plath in the Bell Jar. “A second wave collapsed over my feet, lipped with white froth, and the chill gripped my ankles with a mortal ache.” Wow wee! Those kinds of words would never meet me half way because I never sit down on the sand to write them.

By the beach, I am a straggler, a dawdler, who is always walking, trying to avoid the sand getting into my shoes and in between my toes, however ineptly. Plus, I worry about the seagulls and pelicans, with a taste for malice, leaving gifts from their tail ends on me, as if I am not gifted enough...that way.

Possibly, one day, the beach police may come to their senses and nab me for my aimlessness, but I can always tell them that my loitering is with intent, and this is what spring, which only appears on the calendar, has sprung on me.

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Prompt: What is your favorite Spring Activity?