No. 02
Short essays written on the sea wall, usually with cold hands. Newest first.
Birds
By the time the equinox tide had covered the lower marsh, the godwits had gathered on the last dry mud: a few hundred, shoulder to shoulder, bills tucked, indifferent to the arithmetic I was attempting.
Counting a flock is mostly a matter of choosing a unit. I count in tens until the tens blur, then in patches, then in guesses, and write down the guess with an honest question mark. The marsh has never complained about my numbers.
Plants
Marsh samphire comes up in June, green and slightly translucent, tasting like the sea if the sea had been taught manners. The rule is simple: cut, never pull, and take only from the thick stands.
Pulled plants leave a hole, and a hole in a marsh is an invitation to erosion. A pair of kitchen scissors and a little restraint leaves the bed looking as though nobody had been there at all, which is the highest compliment a marsh can pay.
Shore
Every high tide writes a line along the shore: bladderwrack, razor shells, a single blue glove, cuttlebone, rope. Read it left to right and you have a short history of the last spring tide.
The marsh keeps better time than any of us. It simply refuses to hurry. The wrack line moves up the beach through the fortnight and back down again, and nobody has ever been late to it.
Weather
For nine days the sea wall led into white nothing. Sounds arrived without their sources: a curlew from the left, a tractor from somewhere that was surely the sky, the slow breathing of the tide through the creeks.
I walked with a hand on the fence and learned the marsh by its noises. Fog edits a landscape down to its essentials, and it turns out the essentials are mostly water and patience.
