Child of the summer beach

How she races down the sand and weaves to miss tide flow, a delicate sandpiper of a child. She spraddles flat to catch her second wind, then crawls crabwise to investigate a dune grass hummock shouting glee for a battered kite. Now she flies downwind to lift it, her small feet sand-tracking and her hair blowing in waves across her petal-fair face. A sea anemone, this child - how she blossoms on the sunny beach. The dune, the sand, the sea become a giant conch shell in which she lives these summer days.