The Pirate Ship from Days Long Ago

I sat under the clouds for most of the afternoon. I hadn’t any place to go, not a thing to do, it was the joyous wealth of time, in the expanse of forever. My legs had room to stretch to their fullest. I could lay back and watch the sky or roll over and roll over on my side as if I were a pencil rolling down a desk in school. I didn’t care if my hair, my shirt, my pants were completely filled with Key West white, white sand. I knew it wasn’t Chicago snow. This sky was widest, wildest blue not gray. If was going to be without, then I was glad to be without. . . here.

Mom used to talk about how the summer sun used to wear us out. She said the breeze and sun and would instill and take it out of us. She knew her stuff, because sure enough, I found myself soon pushing sand like an animal, making a space where I might fit. I was literally burrowing in for a small nap out in the fresh air. A nap in the fresh daylight air—that is so not like me. I like dark when I sleep, and lots of blankets and air conditioning, but sleeping by the ocean is a special treat that I wanted again—all stretched and free on the white, white sand.

I woke with the chill of the oncoming evening, and I figured that it was the sign that I needed to head back for some food. The oncoming darkness make me think of days long ago—before electricity when times were more wild. I felt like an explorer, and I suppose in a way I was. I wasn’t quite sure just which way I should go.

I headed in the general direction of where I was most likely to find my hotel and what stuff I had waiting there, I thought of the magical things that naps and dreamy skies, sand, sun and space could bring to mind a mind wasn’t filled with too many details of grown-up worries not worth worrying about. I was pondering the quest of Ponce deLeon and the Fountain of Youth when I came up behind a tree on the ocean side of the beach.

Then I saw it. A pirate ship.

I was sure of it. It was small and what else could it be, hiding there by the tree in the almost dark right there? It was a pirate ship from days of long ago. I knew it. It was owned by good pirates who’d just come home from a swashbuckling pirate adventure. They’d saved a whole colony from an evil king and had won the king’s treasure fair and square in a dangerous, but heartfelt and gallant swordfight. A princess swooned. A dragon died. The people cheered. The flags flew and the horns played when the pirates finally left the shores of the grateful people they had saved.

That’s the beauty of a nap on the beach under the widest, wildest blue, blue sky in the fresh are on the white, white sand. You get to see the pirate ship, when the rest only get to see a boat.

—me strauss Letting me be