souvenir

White pebbles I picked up in the Fire Island swash. They were conspicuous to me because of how well they masquerade as beans; navy, great northern, baby lima. They must have been cooking a long time but they're still not soft.

Also emerging from the ice cold sea, something we didn't take home. An animal that looked like a pale, squishy onion that had a nub on top and some sort of appendage retracting into a central greenish yellow orifice on the bottom. Once we realized it was alive my daughter took pity on it and tried to scoot it back into the sea. She was at the same time repelled by it so its trip back into the surf was not a very smooth delivery. People passing by also had no idea what it was, the best they could wager was that it was an extra large cocktail onion, so I'll go with that for now. I would call it a radiolarian but at the size of a plum it would have made a gargantuan protozoa.

Maybe whatever it was enjoyed the neutralizing of extremes effected by the surf. The sand was so burning hot that day, and the water so freezing cold, that in the end the thermostat of my feet was so tweeked I couldn't tell the difference in the extremes anymore. My feet had gone blind.