Salt Memoir

The tide unpockets its collection of stones and lays them glistening on the morning shelf, each one a word the water learned to say by pressing its mouth against the earth for a thousand patient years.

I have held things like that — so long they changed shape in my hands, became smooth, unrecognizable, the way a name repeated past meaning turns into pure sound, pure weather.

My grandmother kept jars of sea glass on a windowsill that faced the harbor. She said the ocean was just a slow editor, wearing every sharp thing down to something you could love to hold.

Now I stand where the salt marsh exhales its green and tidal breath, and I understand that forgetting is not the opposite of keeping — it is the keeping done by water.