Periodicity

Every year we go to Block Island for Memorial Day weekend. We always rent Pat and Tom Doyle's lovely second-floor apartment; we always go biking and walking, and have delicious fruit-and-pastry breakfasts in the apartment, and go out for some nice dinners. We always have some lunches sitting on the beaches. This year, as I ate lunch watching the waves come in against the rocks, I thought about the rhythms all around. Sometimes we notice things (especially when they come into bloom!):

Some things are easy to take for granted, unless you are rushing to catch the last pendulum swing of the day:

And some cyclical events seem magical no matter how many times we see them.

Seeing Rebecca and Sarah in this context, I thought about our family joke about the pictures we take of them each year on Block Island: If we lined up all of our photos of the two girls in front of the ocean at Block Island, year by year, we could make a flip book and watch them grow up!

And then something very different happened this year. On Sunday, we took our annual bike ride out Corn Neck Road, to the beach at the North Lighthouse. As we walked along the beach, Amy suddenly said, "Look! Seals!!"

There were perhaps a dozen seals (we think they were harbor seals), including a huge male, swimming off shore. At first they were about 60 feet out, but as we spent the afternoon watching them, one started surfing the waves at the point, and two came right up to the beach. They seemed as fascinated with humans as we were with them; they spent a lot of time staring at us when they weren't playing or floating. We were told that this visit was very unusual; seals are common in colder weather but are not usually seen in such warm water. What took the seals out of their usual rhythm -- a change in the currents, some change in available food, the seal equivalent of missing the last ferry? In any case, their change provided us with an unexpected pleasure.