Salisbury, Massachusetts

The sun is proud and intense drenching us in its hottest summer rays.

I love the way the water changes colors as it rolls to land—morphing from navy blue in the depths, to green in the rising waves, to the purest white sea-foam as it comes crashing to shore, and finally, brown as it mingles with the sand and is drawn back out to sea.

The waves hollow out pockets in the sand that fill with bubbling water and catch your unsuspecting feet in their grasp. The shallow water pulling over these pockets stirs the sand, causing it to rise in wispy billows like dark storm clouds beneath the waves.

Sometimes I wonder how I could have grown up so far from the ocean (in Missouri, a land-locked state). And then I watch the waves as they billow and roll and somehow it reminds me of home and the vast, sweeping Plains. The waves swell and sigh like the corn and wheat rocking and bowing to the wind and two places so different somehow seem so much the same—vast, boundless, and loud with their silence.