From Rachel Carson’s notebooks, collected in Lost Woods:
Saw tracks of a shore bird — probably a sanderling, and followed them a little, then they turned toward the water and were soon obliterated by the sea. How much it washes away, and makes as though it had never been. Time itself is like the sea, containing all that came before us, sooner or later sweeping us away on its flood and washing over and obliterating the traces of our presence, as the sea this morning erased the footprints of the bird.
An appropriate end of the year thought, no?
Kit Stolz 