I am walking down the beach intending to cross Jeremy Creek at low tide where the big shells are, when my cell phone rings.
My dear old friend is dead. Her death has lasted for three years, first the brain and then the body. And now she is at peace.
Oddly, it is just here at the campground behind the big dunes where she used to come, driving down in her Mustang convertible with her son, Willie, for camping under the stars with the sound of ocean waves and the scent of the sea air.
I turn back and gather a bag full of oyster shells, the old kind battered by the tides, that have holes in them. I buy a spool of crab trap cord at the gas station. And then I find a gnarled spindly piece of drift wood and tie the shells to it into a makeshift wind chime.
I hung the chime on the edge of the marsh so that at night I could hear the clacking, clinking sounds of a kind of prayer for the dead, wafting across the water.
Peace. Amen.
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