High Tide.

My mother says I grew up here, but that's not true: I grew up in the backyard at 20 Brandon Ridge, in the backyard at 2717 Goodfellows Road. I tried to undo all that at 930 and 933 Carr Street, but that's hardly the point: We've been coming here nearly thirty years now, and I can understand why she'd feel like I grew up first at the Coquina condominiums, where there was a diving board, and then here, at the Sandollar, where there is no diving board but there is a washer and dryer. Thirty years will give you a pretty good sense, though, of when a storm might slide by, and when, like yesterday, it will blow and bang and then set in a while and just safely rain such that you can hunker down on the beach post-electric portion of the storm and read while a gentle hours-long rain ticks itself all over the nylon roof of your umbrella.

In Things-You-Thought-You-Knew News, it turns out that what I thought were Sandpipers all these years are not Sandpipers at all, or, rather, that Sandpipers are a class of birds in the way that Gulls are a class of birds. Our Sandpipers are Willets.

Finally, the waves out there are smaller than yesterday, and conditions are glassy to super-glassy. Waves are shin- to maybe knee-high. High tide at 1:40 here about three miles north of the Matanzas River. The dude on the Surf Report sounds less stoked than he was earlier in the week. As for me and my kind, though, I am the same amount of stoked.

The moon makes the tides happen. We learn this early on— elementary school or so. That doesn't make it seem to me any less impossible.