What the Salt Remembers

The tide does not forget the shape of stones it has polished for a thousand years. Each recession leaves its grammar on the sand— a sentence half-erased, still legible.

My grandmother's hands knew this same patience, folding cloth along its faded creases, the linen holding the ghost of every fold that came before. Some knowledge lives in matter.

I have walked this shore since I was small enough to call a mussel shell a house. Now the harbor light catches the same water at a different angle, and I am changed, though the estuary does not notice.

What persists is not the self but the attending— the way attention wears a groove in the world like water finds its level, fills the lowest place, and stays.