Altered for Kindness

“Yo, shell and stick guy get a job.”

These are the words scrawled on the fence at the beach entrance. The fence, built years ago to keep vehicles from further eroding the steep access, has been wrecked once by a storm and several times by people. But, more recently, like many unmonitored flat surfaces, it has been a place for personal ads and public notices — and, like this one, private opinions.

The black words stood out against the wood fence, perhaps the work of a Sharpie permanent marker. Down, below the fence, on the edge of sand that has sustained a storm, are two new pieces — the whimsical and fairly anonymous constructions of shells, a stick, sometimes a feather or a blade of grass, that grace the beach with their impermanent philosophy.

There are many architects, sandcastle builders, really, who have tried, and yet it is these, really, the only ones who have achieved it. The mere whips are beautiful reminders, like windows you can look through to see the ocean beyond the breakable, erodible place we stand.

As I prepare to leave the beach, I see the charred logs from an extinguished fire, and it occurs to me that the misguided message was perhaps only written with charcoal — or at least it could be blacked out with it.

I grabbed a piece and positioned it in my hand, preparing to make broad strokes. But as I faced the fence, I saw that a heart had been added to the sentence, and in the moments of a sunset, someone else had already changed the text: “Yo shell and stick guy Great job.”

Earlier in the day, I missed a dedication ceremony at the Little Red Schoolhouse. A bench had been placed to honor and remember Barbara Albright.

Barbara loved the school and saw it, and herself, as a means for self-improvement. She loved the history of this community, and she volunteered to protect and promote it.

I’d planned to go, but farming got in the way; I knew she would have understood. And, anyway, she was too modest to have cared.

Still, I regretted not being there, and so when I saw that the writing on the fence had been changed for the better, altered for kindness instead of contempt, I had a moment, again, with Mrs. Albright.