2 OUR BEACH CABIN SITS ATOP A SUGARY-WHITE SAND DUNE AT THE SOUTHern boundary of raw, simple country, the pine woods and great savannas of northern Florida. A state road a half-mile inland follows the coastline. Cars pass infrequently, their whine burning through the sky. From its walls the cabin gives a faint, even historic, scent of marsh grass and rusty bed springs. Army bunks sit everywhere, even on the front porch. The hallway descends into photographs of my father, my grandfather, my nine-fingered great-grandfather, their wives and their boats and their children. Faded inscriptions say, "Papa with his boat, 1913," "Summer, 1955: Pat frying the big trout that daddy caught," "The children, July 4th, 1960. (Little David is in bed sick)." It is my seventh year, the summer of 1960. Mother takes my sister Caroline and me on a long walk, down to the marshes' edge. In the afternoon wind the saw grass bows to the land. Sandbars swell and ripple. A carpet of fiddler crabs appears, stopping to flutter in place. They hum and they crackle. "Honey," Mother says to me, "behind your ankle. There!" I turn around and pick up a crab with an iridescent lavender shell and long-stalked, wiggling eyeballs. I hold it to Mother's face. "My goodness!" she exclaims. "That's a pretty one. You wonder who he's looking at!" She smiles a silly smile, slants her head with the crab's, and rolls her eyes. The crab sits on my palm. I look at its claws. One is tiny and the other is enormous, bigger than its shell. "God sure does make peculiar creatures," Mother says as she cups her hand under mine. I think of God as an old man putting pieces of crab together. "Do you think God made it this way on purpose?" I ask. Copyrighted Material 7 "Why I'm sure he did," she says. "Don't you think it's pretty?" "Yeah," I say, holding the single large claw. But I think God made a mistake. Maybe he really tried, but his fingers were just too big and he gave up halfway through. My sister has found another crab and hurries it into a plastic bucket. "Mama," she yells, "look!" Mother takes my sister's hand in hers while they both bend over to watch the tiny crab trot sideways around the edge. "Can I take mine to Cub Scouts?" I ask her. "No, Mommy," says Caroline, "he'll let it go in the house and it'll die somewhere and start stinking, like those hermit crabs he caught last year." "Well ..." Mother says to me. "If I let you take him, you'll have to bring him right back here and let him go." For a moment she stands nobly, filled with power and beauty. I am amazed. We turn back toward the cabin. Caroline swings the bucket in her hand and looks into it again and again. "Let's name him," she says. "Let's name him Purple." We decide we're going to set up a little house for Purple. We run ahead of Mother, up the path to the cabin, flying to the front porch. We fling open the screen door and find Dad painting the window sill; we show him the crab. "I got it," I announce. "No, you didn't," Caroline says. "I got it." "Well, go get some salt water and sand so he can have a place to burrow into," Dad tells us. "How come?" I ask. "He needs a place to sleep," Dad says. "He sleeps in his burrow." Together we swoop down to the shore and hurry back to make Purple's home. We put the bucket atop the old tube radio. Mother sets up a card table and gives Caroline and me a mountain lake jigsaw puzzle. We can put it together while she makes sandwiches. This is our quiet hour. I wait at the table, searching for the edges, purring. I love her so much. My mother grew up in polite Southern society, protected by her parents from the vulgar and the base. But she fully understood human beings' capacity to cause horror. In a speech against war in her college years, she addressed the audience like a mother who is waking a child from a dream. Exquisitely sensitive to the necessity of patriotism, effusing sweet idealism, her speech about World War II got the attention of the local paper...