The lone pink flip flop
Sits on the warm sand
‘midst the stick and shells
And little bits of broken plastic
Coughed up by the passing
Autumnal storm

September 17, 2011. Kim, Fiona, Wesley and I went to Hammonasset State Park. While it had been cold in the morning at our house, the afternoon was quite pleasant and the water and sand warm.

I took Wesley for a walk up the beach. Along the way, I saw a lone pink flip flop lying on the sand surrounded by other material that had I assume had been washed ashore during Hurricane Irene. It was small and most likely had belonged to a young girl. I wondered if the young girl had cried when she lost her flip flop. I thought of it in terms of part of a pair that had lost its mate and I thought of T. Francis Stanton and the mourning of his widow.

I wondered if after years of being tossed about, the lone pink flip flop would break down into little bits of broken plastic like some of the other flotsam tossed ashore, or if through the marvels of plastic, we had created an eternal memorial to childhood on a summer beach.

Yet here we were, a few weeks after Labor day, the cultural start of fall and a few days before the equinox. The first big autumnal storm had passed through and the beach season was all but over. How many more storms would we see before winter, and was this, too, a parallel to the passing of life.