April 27, 2013

• Ya gotta know when to skim

   

   

   

   

  It’s like salt. We all need salt, our bodies crave it. This flesh refuses to function properly and will down right kill us without it. So we seek it out. Where it is scarce it becomes currency more precious than gold. There are markets dedicated solely to salt and all it’s various flavors, colors, and crystal composition. Gourmet salt, who knew? For some reason the common salt mined and scraped out of the ground has become the inferior grade. We desire “Sea Salt”. Supposedly, it is superior. Yet our bodies don’t give a lick whether the salt is from the ground or the sea. Any old salt will satisfy the bodies need.

  I can remember my daughter telling me how she and her husband would go out and harvest salt in Hawaii. A few days after a storm, they would go to the areas where the waves would crash upon the shore and leave small pools of salt water in depressions on the lava benches. In those few days the water would evaporate and leave the sea salt behind. It was important to get it at the optimal time. Too soon and there’s too much water and too little salt. Too late and the salt would be dirty or blown away. “Ya gotta know when to skim, Mom! It’s an art.”

  Time is like that. It slowly disappears leaving behind the bits and bobs of memory and life. Ya gotta know when to skim….

   

  To stand at the edge of the sea, to sense the ebb and flow of the tides, to feel the breath of a mist moving over a great salt marsh, to watch the flight of shore birds that have swept up and down the surf lines of the continents for untold thousands of year, to see the running of the old eels and the young shad to the sea, is to have knowledge of things that are as nearly eternal as any earthly life can be.”

  Rachel Carson

   

   

  • 6:07 PM
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