Folly Beach - Dorothea Benton Frank [39]
“Thanks!” I called back to her. It occurred to me that our world today was pretty darned precarious if my aunt felt she needed an alarm on Folly Beach but that’s how the world had changed. Everyone everywhere was at risk all the time. If it wasn’t Al Qaeda scaring the liver out of you to take a plane to some benign place like Omaha, it was teenagers who’d rob you blind in your own house so they could get high on meth or whatever it was our young druggies of today ingested for sport.
I opened one of the French doors, let myself outside, and stood there, some twenty feet above the Atlantic. I looked around for a moment and then made a beeline to the railing, leaning on it, scanning the beach. It was empty except for a few dog-walkers and runners. The morning fog was disappearing by the minute, giving way to blue skies, and there was no doubt, it was going to be a beautiful day. I counted three container ships out near the horizon. They were fully loaded with heavy cargo and riding low in the water, probably on their way to Germany to deliver BMWs or to parts unknown with whatever we were exporting these days. Gorgeous. South Carolina had certainly come a long way from the days of tall sailing ships carrying cotton, rice, and indigo back to the mother country. Yes, she had. Yet, though those days were centuries ago, the historic images of tall ships were very easy to visualize, highly polished wooden vessels, gleaming brass fittings, stark white sails unfurled, taut, their cheeks filled with easterly wind, keeling and moving briskly across the water . . . there was something romantic about living in a port city. Ports were not stagnant. They were always in motion, engaged in their own particular endless rhythms. Movement was the soul of their very nature and I loved it. I loved the waters of Charleston’s song most especially because she had saved me from despair so many times.
When I was a little girl I spent hours wandering along the edges of this very shore, my sneakers sinking in the soft sand, my footprints filling quickly with the rising tide. It was hypnotic, watching tides roll in to wash the shore with their swirl and froth. The water chased the flocks of tiny sandpipers away, back into the salty air and they landed some twenty feet down the shoreline. Then the water pulled back only to slide in again, over and over, in its own measured time, covering the beach inch by inch, until it reached its high-water mark.
Low tides, most especially after storms, revealed treasures sprinkled along the shore—shells, bits of seaweed, driftwood, and so on. These were the things Patti and I gathered and saved. We held conch shells, whelks really, to the sides of our heads to hear their secrets. We decorated our elaborate sandcastles with moon shells and cockles. With the tips of our fingers, we carefully pried sand dollars from the mud they suckled for nourishment and safety, strung them across the deck railings, and before long the merciless sun bleached them to chalk-white. During the years of a good haul, we suspended our sand dollars from thin satin ribbons and hung them on our Christmas trees. Other times we broke them apart to find the five doves of peace that Aunt Daisy told us were in there. For us, for all of us, Folly Beach was filled with a kind of sacred majesty and in return for our homage she gave us endless rewards.
After our parents died, Patti and I would sit on this very same beach, usually on an old palmetto log that had washed up from another island. Those were terrible days. We’d damn our lives, and try to find a dream for our futures. Dreams eluded us. Blinded by salty tears and wiping runny noses on our sleeves, we would tell each other that there had to be more to life than grief. We would argue with each other, swearing that if there