Tracks in the sand
Kezzie, Jonah and I went for a walk after MB left for SLO and her date with LSAT destiny. Kezzie kept finding sticks and at each fork in the path, would toss one in the air to see where we should go ... well, she has seen Yojimbo more than once, and Gracie and I started watching jidai-geki when Gracie was only five.
Eventually our drunkard's walk took us to the dry sands and gravels of the Salinas River. From the bottom of the main channel, below the nominal banks of a river last seen more than a month ago, from within the tules, we were within a different world. Armored husks of crayfish and damp circles filled with still silver minnows amazed Kezzie, while Jonah preferred to find the fine sandbanks where clods could be prized out and sent arcing into the air and vanish in a puff of dust where the arc touches the ground.
The paths of tarantulas, so regular and fine, three dimples on each side, again and again, like the frozen stokes of a hand sized Mediterranean trireme, crossed the waving, yet motionless dry sand. Kezzie recognized the animal from its tracks the third time we came across the dry record of passage, but had a harder time seeing the snakes from their broad pushing, and still can't see direction from the chain of impression. When she saw the hands of racoon she was confident she'd found someone ... Aziz in Abenaki ... the trickster, who left us interesting assemblages of crayfish parts.
And then we were back on pavement and Jonah was talking about chocolate milk.
