Of oysters and ducks.

Yesterday, the rain was a tease and it revealed me as a fool.

It rained hard all morning. So hard it kept me in our rental house and kept Whiskey pacing and forlorn. Would we never again, her dog-brain wondered, go swimming in the sea? What if the sea itself dried up and I could swim no more? She looked sad and basset-houndy.

Around two, there was a break in the downpour and I piled her into the Simca. My wife had read about an Idyllic dog beach that was not to be missed and we sped there in my car. Whiskey panted and paced in the backseat. We made it to Crowe's Pasture 20 minutes later.

We walked and walked through a path in the marsh and the skies opened again and soaked us. But we walked ever forward, like a turtle programmed through thousands of years to return to the sea.

We finally found an open expanse of sand a mile wide, strafed with tide pools and rivulets. There were a dozen four-wheel-drive pickups parked on the sand, and groups of men in orange fatigues and waders laboring on the beach on some contraptions.

I went over to a gaggle of them. We spoke in the rain.

"We are farming oysters," a man said, tossing some small ones back into their man-made oyster beds to grow some more. "We grow oysters and ship them all over the world. They are the best oysters, the ones right here."

"I see," I added with my usual sagacity.

"At high-tide this is all under 12 feet of water. So be careful out here," he said as we walked off to play with Whiskey in a tide pool.

The rain came harder. 

I made a joke or two about building an Ark.

My wife didn't laugh.

We walked a mile or two back to the car with Whiskey wet, tired and happy and carrying her duck.

We were soaked and dripping and not carrying a duck.

But we too were happy.