The place is very different, but some things remain the same. Last time I went wading along a solitary beach, it was four years and a lifetime ago. That beach was coarse red sand and clay, lined with flat red shale so soft you could break slips of it between your fingers, and the calm and gentle water was sea-salt. This water is fresh and playing a little rough. Not so rough as the North Atlantic; but a Great Lake, even one of the smaller ones, is still nothing to sneeze at. The sand here is the softest and whitest I've ever encountered, and the beach pebbles--perfectly rounded ovals, mostly--are near-white limestone.

Still, beach wading is beach wading and a very good thing for the soul. No wonder water's used to purify and refresh: salt or fresh, it has those properties. The light at day's end is as gently silver on this water as on that water. And the light and water together quiet my unquietness. As I said, some things don't change.

Water can change this shore, peacefully building the great dunes that fringe the east side of this bay, pounding the limestone pebbles, reshaping the shoreline. But it can't do much for the dead baby snapping turtle I found bobbing at the water's edge. It must have hatched on this beach and headed off across the fine sand for the life and safety of the water. Its tiny wrinkled face, its pointed stub of a tail, its legs with their silly claws (as outsized as a puppy's feet) were apparently intact. Its tiny rough carapace, only an inch and a bit long, wasn't broken. Lord only knows what killed it.

I still remember the monster snapping turtle we found in the road, years ago--I'll bet anything it's still around, 10 years later, in some ditch out in our township, unless one of the local good ol' boys ran it down with a pickup truck. Nothing much smaller would tangle with a snapper that big. That one was at least a foot and a third long in the great formidably ridged carapace, with jaws that could snap a hockey stick in two without thought or effort. This little guy would never get that big. I suppose few snappers do. Water can't bring it back to life, can't restore its promise. Nor could time or love do anything for it. I suppose God could resurrect it, but God doesn't do that.

Sometimes water, or love, or time, or God, won't mend what ails us, in the sense of setting to rights what has been harmed or damaged. We are hurt, because life's like that: sometimes we get all better, sometimes we don't. Sometimes the damage goes too deep or is too serious and permanent, or hits in places where we are too vulnerable. Repair and restoration may not be in the books, or at least not in this life. Not because God isn't good, but because God, having done Creation, doesn't mess around with it. Some baby snapping turtles will survive the trek from nest to water. Others won't. Still others will die before they're the size of a lemon. Very few will reach the fullest size and stature.

But if water, and love, and time, and God don't always mend what has been broken, they can and do rub the edges off. Each and every pebble on this beach was once a shard, sharp-edged and rudely shattered from its parent rock. And now each is a gentle curve, not soft, but smoothed and made a satisfaction for the hand to hold.

Water, and love, and time, and God can't turn back the clock. We are where we are, which is all too often where (we wish to God) we never wanted to fetch up at all. All we can do, then, is to let water, and love, and time, and God do what they can to make something new of us. We can't go back. We can only go forward. We can sit here passively waiting for them to do the work, resenting the past, concentrating on our own marredness, our wretchedness. Or we can reach out, actively cooperating, learning to love both others and ourselves where we are, turning toward the Light and pushing forward into some unknown, trusting that it will all come right in the end.

Back at the place where I was staying, I had a long hot shower to get all the sand off. It's so fine that it clings to one's toes and fingernails and gets into one's hair and ears. The water here is very soft, a mild shock after the hard water we have at home. It was warm on my skin and so gentle--a touch that felt like love, consoling. I stayed there much longer than I had to, accepting this greatest of gifts, this water.