Buckets

by Elizabeth Aharonian Moon

She sat in her striped beach chair looking out to the sea. The late morning sun--a September sun-- made a glistening white triangle from the horizon to just beyond the buoy, but otherwise, the ocean was navy-blue and flat. As it neared the shore, the water gathered into itself, puckering up and spilling over into a lacy ruffle, meeting the hem of the damp sand.

Alone, but for a couple of walkers, their shoes in hand, and a lady in a black skirted bathing suit hunched over her Kindle, she noticed, not far off, two little kids. One was locked from knee to neck in a new-fangled surfer suit; the other wore baggy bright shorts. Both had buckets. The taller blonde one's was plastic, a green color, its handle a rope. The other boy, dark haired, and Asian looking, held an orange one, the handle a mis-matched red vinyl strip. He carried a shovel.

They were kids on a mission and whomever they belonged to had given them a task. While one dunked his pail into the froth at the edge of the sea, the other shoveled sand into his bucket from a hole he had started on the dry beach. The water sloshed over the rim as the one carried it to the hole; the sand weighed down the pail as the other one lugged it to the sea. Two little kids, like Sisyphus, she thought. All that energy, all that life, all that exertion: the sand to the sea; the sea to the sand. Fill and spill, fill and spill, over and over and over.

She too would one day have a bucket to fill, but it would not be with sand or salt water. It would be of calcified bones, ground to gray powder, a canister of ashes, tossed, if her adult children followed her directions, into the ever-moving sea.

Photo by Law Hamilton