Sandcastle Therapy

We went down to the beach at around 9:30 this morning. Beautiful weather. Lots of shells. And perfect sand for building a sand castle. I had bought a $2 shovel about 3 feet long at Walmart yesterday, so that gave us a heavy duty tool to start big. We dug a nice moat about 4 feet in diameter and piled the sand in the center. Then we shaped the pile of sand into a nice base and started adding our turrets to the top with our sand buckets. Then there were the endless trips to the surf with our buckets to get water to fill our moat. Finally, we decorated with abundant shells we found laying around us. I didn’t have a camera with us, but we’ll build another and take a picture.

There is something so relaxing about building a sand castle. I don’t know why really, but I suspect it is because there is no lumber math involved… there are no plans… and it’s very loose and flowing, like a 3-D sketch of something. It is built with by eye and whim, and not so much the brain. You can change your mind in an instant and add a bridge, wipe out a section and rebuild it — and it doesn’t really matter.

After we finished our sandcastle, I swam a bit with Merritt and let Erin play with Anna in the sand. When I came back, I picked up the shovel and just started digging a hole in the sand. I had the thought, “I wonder how deep I could dig a hole with this little 3′ shovel?” Well, Erin came over and asked what I was doing. She wanted to know why I was digging a hole and didn’t seem satisfied with the answer, “I’m just digging a hole.” She asked, “What are you going to put in the hole?” I stuck with, “Nothing, I’m just digging a hole.” By this time, she wanted to buy in to my mission of hole digging and began helping. I don’t really know how deep we could have dug our hole in the sand, but we stopped digging at around 4 feet. When Erin got in the hole, the surface was about even with the top of her head.

It was a great morning…

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