the other side of the sandbar

imagine that on the same day, in the very same moment, two baby girls are born.

one, on the shores of the pacific to parents and grandparents who fish its waters.

the other, in the middle of a continent, on wide prairie tilled by generations.

both are deeply loved.

on her third day of life, the tide recedes low enough to reveal a sandbar and shore baby's mother binds her with fabric to her father's chest.

one hand to the dewy nape of her fresh neck, her father navigates a barnacled path of ulva and rockweed, eccentric sand dollars crunch beneath steady steps through seagrass meadows. he reaches the near edge of the expansive sand and pauses a moment to look back, the small, stilted cabin hung into the bluffs, her mother silhouetted in the window. father takes his daughter's tiny hand in his and waves, a gesture too small to be seen, before he turns and continues on across the sand to a place he knows to be magic.

the water is clear as air on the other side of the sandbar. he drops to his knees and dips her impossibly small toes. three days old.

and every summer sandbar after that, to her knees, her waist, her chest. it takes little time for shore baby to learn to swim in the clearest waters over the softest sand. together they build a palace in time, her father, her mother, and her.

prairie baby girl grows too, strong and sure, into a young woman of eighteen, capable of many things.

she rises before the sun and sets to her land-worked hands. she is deafened by the whispered sigh of struggling seed, the mournful skies weeping dry.

land is magic and work is love

and roots grab deep and in eighteen years prairie baby has never seen the sea.

imagine these two young women of precisely eighteen, one unaware of the other, living their lives so far apart.

and ask- what would it take for each to swim the other side of the sandbar?

our girl, born on the shores, laughs at the simplicity of the request. she knows the beach, knows the tides, knows to bear barnacles on bared feet by stepping slow. she trusts the ocean's depths will hold her high as her feet leave soft sand and she swims.

our prairie girl hardly understands the question. what exactly is a sandbar, how might she find one two thousand kilometres away? and importantly, why on earth might she want to go? perhaps somewhere down deep a small voice is curious.

and what a miracle that is alone.

then, should she afford the time away, the ticket's cost, she may board a train pointed west. she may find the coast, it isn't all that hard, after all. and even a prairie girl knows that tides will rise and tides will fall.

but there are more spots than not where a sandbar will never reveal, where one might mistake its beauty for the whole meal. prairie baby may sit up in Bella Coola or the wrong side of Aristazabel and wait her whole life away.

or she may, by some enormous thwack of fate, make it to a sandbar beach. and still.

she may arrive at neap tide and think that she has taken a wrong turn somewhere along the way, she may not know to wait. she may board a train pointed east, sure that the other side of the sandbar is in a simple man's dream.

but she may also wait, and wait, until a low tide day on a sandbar beach, and even then she may think, that seeing is the whole darn thing.

or she may step forth and cut her feet, or slip and fall on slick seaweed. and that may send her back to the beach. or she may reach the purest sand and fall to her knees and bury her hands. who has come farther then?

what tidal act of fate for her to cross the bar and to submerge in the clearest waters over softest sand, to trust the buoyant carpenter in her who builds. a bridge from there to here. who has come farther then?

and then she swims. and she sees the water on the other side of the sandbar with eyes fresher than three days in, and we all ask, who has come farther then?

and maybe, maybe by some chance, she swims and stroke and runs right in to her birth time twin, there again rejoicing in the waters. and she is her and she is me.

and when love hits, a parting sea.

and they come together then, a billion might never-have-beens, stepped over and around and who, who has come farther then?