Five pelicans, flying in formation, skimming low over the water on the lookout for fish.

A thirteen-year-old golden retriever lowering himself to his haunches in the surf, then clambering out on the sand to wiggle ecstatically on his back.

Bubbles rising silently in a straight-sided copper bottom pot. The same pot a few minutes later, shimmering and shaking over a wide red coil of heat.

The bright black eyes of a squirrel fixed on mine as he advanced down a branch and toward my waiting palm.

Tan foam that looked like dirty whipped cream, surfing in on the waves that fold and retreat, fold and retreat, fold and retreat, at the shoreline.

A woman wearing a long white shirt and black shorts, bent at the waist and peering intently at something only she could see in the water.

An uninhabited wooden platform, like a treeless treehouse and taller than all of the few surrounding houses, standing sentry in a white sand lawn.

The silent, slender t-shirted backs of two sleeping teenage girls.

The far-apart vanishing footprints of someone who must have been running in the sand.

A transparent, blue-rainbowed sea creature blown up on the beach, shaped like a Chinese potsticker and trembling in the wind.