Karma’s a Beach.

I’m just finishing another fantastic week hanging with my sistuh-from-anuthuh-muthuh and the rest of my New Jersey family and, as always, there were lots of shenanigans. Some of our adventures made it onto social media and some did not, but there was one particular laugh riot that needed its own blog post.

Some things I have learned about Liz over the years:

1. She is not easily grossed out
2. She can be extremely impulsive
3. She is very curious

When you know those three things about her, it shouldn’t surprise you that when she is walking on the beach and comes across some foreign object in the sand that is unrecognizable, she exclaims “WHAT’S THIS??” while kicking it over with her bare foot so she can get a better view. She kicks over rocks and wood and trash and dead crabs and other related dead sea life.

Side note: She picked up what she thought was a bagel-sized piece of shark skin over the weekend and I nearly tossed my cookies right there on the beach. “I think it’s shark skin!” she said excitedly as she walked towards me with it. “Here! Touch it!”

That was gross.

Anyway, I’m always afraid, as she’s kicking over things, that she’s going to get stung, poisoned, cut, or some other horrible fate. Hold onto that thought as I set up what happened on Saturday.

We were at one of our Happy Places, which is Cape May. It was windy, EXTREMELY windy. There were no boats on the water and the beach looked a little bit like a desert sandstorm. It was difficult to walk and sand was depositing itself all over our clothes, in our purses, and in our hair. WINDY.

It was a lot like a Chicago snowstorm: some of the particles flying through the air hit our face feeling a lot like tiny ice chips, and just like the snow drifts quickly in a storm, this little sandblast was having the same effect on the beach.

We were making our way south on the beach when we approached one of the rock jetties. I didn’t take a picture from that vantage point but you can see it from the other side on the left in this picture:

We were still about twenty feet from it and not very close to the water when Liz came upon a couple of those black rocks, small ones, sticking up out of the sand. In the middle of the rocks there was a little hole. She tapped one of the rocks and said, “Well THAT’S an ankle waiting to be broken…” and then, while I can’t remember if she kicked at one of the rocks or stepped on one, I saw whatever it was that she did and exclaimed “Oh my gosh, you’re like a four-year-old! Stop that!” I mean, the last thing we needed was for one of us to get hurt.

We kept on walking and as we got closer to the jetty, we were looking around for shells and such (as we do). The sand was extremely smooth there. and we started walking further away from the water’s edge, parallel to the jetty. We were talking and walking on this smooth sand, and then it happened. I only felt terror for the split second it took for my left leg to be swallowed by the sand, and then I started laughing. Liz, who was a couple of steps ahead of me, turned back when she heard me scream and when she didn’t see me at eye level she looked down and found me on the ground. She says she thought I was kidding at first. And then the laughter. What had happened was, we were walking on that smooth sand and it didn’t occur to either of us, even after Liz had found that group of rocks with the hole in it, that the sand could have covered up that much of the part of the jetty that extended up the beach towards the street. I fell into the beach, right here:

(A moment before I arrived, that was completely covered with smooth sand, looking totally innocent.)

How far did I fall? Well, my left leg went down and I fell, ahem, as far as I could with my right leg still above sand, if you catch my drift (see what I did there?).

So there I was, beyond that moment of terror and laughing my head off, holding my hand out to Liz so she could help me get out. She reached out for a minute and then grabbed her hand back to clutch her stomach because she was laughing so hard. I ended up laying back on the beach, one leg in that hole and one leg (somehow) on the sand surface, in hysterics. After the screaming laughter, she helped me out of the hole and as we continued to walk up the beach, thankful that I didn’t sprain my ankle or even break my leg (soooo thankful!), one of us brought up how “odd” the timing was, my falling into that hole right after I called Liz a four-year-old. Such a coincidence!! Okay, maybe not.

Coincidence or karma, we’re thrilled to add this story to the rich tapestry (shout out to Carole King) of crazy, fall-on-the-floor (or sand) laughing moments that we’ll talk about for years to come.

“Remember that time I fell into the beach?”
“Yep. That was a great day.”