Morning Miracle

I wake to a dark sky without hint of the sunrise to come. The air is cool but humid, no movement just the promise of another beautiful beach day.  For two days and nights my sister and I have delighted in our little condo on the beach, a gift from my brother’s work partner.  In decades of Florida family visits, I have never stayed on the beach; in fact, on some visits I have seen the water and beach only from the air or a quick drive-by.  So this time has been surprisingly special.

Longboat Key is a narrow island between two others near Sarasota on the West Coast of Florida. Yesterday I found out that it is a turtle nesting spot, hence our condo’s name, Turtle Crawl.  My heart lifted when I saw two yellow stakes stuck in the sand on the beach in front of our rooms. Maybe this would fulfill a long time dream of witnessing tiny turtles hatching.   But both stakes have a date and an H written on them, signifying, I think, that the hatches happened on 9/10 and 9/14, just a couple of days before our arrival. 

I pull on yesterday’s clothes, fix a mug of green tea and walk to the balcony offering a silent prayer of thanks for a wonderful family visit and a quiet request for a turtle sighting.  My sister is already at work on her computer at the kitchen table. I sit to talk with her, but she is too focused on the landscaping plans for the day ahead and a problem with a difficult client. My gaze turns to the lightening sky over the beach.  Two men kneel at the 9/14 stake. I jump up, run out the door, down two flights of stairs, along the bricked path between two buildings, past the open lawn, into the sand and see one man walking to the water, his hand held up in front of him.  A turtle? I call out, “Wait. Please. Wait!” He does, it is. As my feet step into the water’s edge, he holds out his hand to show me the little turtle. I gasp, smile. “Thank you SO much!”I always wanted to see this,” I say. The turtle’s tiny feet/flippers move even before he touches the wet sand. He crawls so fast, as though he knows what lies ahead and cannot wait to be in the enormous expanse of water. A wave meets him and together they are pulled into the sea.

Gratitude explodes in my chest. My feet barely touch the ground. The volunteer and I turn to join the biologist back at the yellow stake who carefully pulls wet packed sand out of a hole with his gloved fingers. In a small black bucket are two more turtles! The two men speak something I cannot hear over the surf, and the biologist steps away to call someone. I ask the volunteer who kneels over the hole, “Can you explain to me what is happening here?”  He looks at me and shakes his head, “ This is very unusual, very surprising. We don’t expect to find this.” “’What do you mean?” I urge. “We came to excavate the eggs from the hatch three days ago. We always wait three days and then come back to check the nest.  We rarely find live turtles.  We know 25 turtles hatched here on the 14^th. We did not expect any today.”  “ Do you think there are even more?” I ask.  “Probably,” he says.  We look down and watch the sand moving. “Look!” I cry, “Is that a flipper or a head?”