We have a niece, the daughter of my brother, who grew up on Whidbey Island. When she was tiny, we visited them on the island. We lived in Idaho, and later in South Dakota, so we didn’t get out to the west coast very often. There has always seemed to me to be something a bit romantic about growing up on an island. Whidbey is a large island. On the south end is the ferry to Mukiteo, with Everett and Seattle beyond. There is a huge Boeing factory at Paine Field not far from the ferry terminal and workers who live on the island commute by ferry. The island wraps north with Camano Island between it and the area north of Everett on the mainland. At the northern end of the Island is Deception Pass State Park. A bridge spans the pass to Fidalgo Island where another bridge connects it to the mainland near LaConner. When our niece was little, we would take the ferry and visit the south end of the island. When we moved out to Washington we spend a bit more time visiting the north end of the island, as it was a short drive from the home we rented when we lived in Mount Vernon. By then our niece had grown up, gone to college back east, traveled the world, and gotten married.

She now is an adult with a beautiful daughter of her own who is almost four years old. Yesterday we met my brother and our niece and her family at Deception Pass State Park. She comes back to the island where she grew up frequently to visit. Her mother still lives on the island and this year was a high school reunion and an opportunity to get together with old friends. I think that there is something about having grown up on an island that makes you want to come back to the island. There is a quality of life there that is different than living on the mainland. Our niece has always been an island girl in my mind. She is a terrific swimmer and, like her mother, swims in the ocean when it seems very cold to us.

For our day visit to the island, we had our six-year-old granddaughter with us. Her older sister and brother were attending space camp at a robotics and coding school and weren’t available for the trip and her baby brother was too young to be away from his mother for that long. It is a special treat for us when we have time with just one of our grandchildren. This one is adventurous and loves being outdoors and exploring a bit of the island was a great fit for her. She plays well with other children and she and our great niece got along well, painting pictures and rocks, discovering things along the beach and, of course, playing in the water. We met near Cranberry lake, where there is a fresh water lake that is very close to the ocean. A narrow spit of land separates the two and there is a sandy beach where you can dip in the ocean, and walk across the sand to dip in the lake.

When it was time for us to go, I got the chore of cleaning up our granddaughter’s feet so she could slip them into her shoes. Her father had packed a change of clothes so she had dry clothes, but before she could put on her shoes, someone had to clean the sand from between her toes. It is a wonderfully fun, giggly task for a grandpa and one I loved when our children were little. It always makes me think of a poem by A.A. Milne:

“I went down to the shouting sea,
Taking Christopher down with me,
For Nurse had given us sixpence each-
And down we went to the beach.

“We had sand in the eyes and the ears and the nose,
And sand in the hair, and sand-between-the-toes.
Whenever a good nor'wester blows,
Christopher is certain of
Sand-between-the-toes.”

There is more to the poem - three verses with the refrain after each. It is the refrain that seems so musical to me. I’ve been with children with “sand in the eyes and the ears and the nose, and sand in the hair, and sand-between-the-toes.”

Our granddaughter has a librarian for a father, and I’m sure that they have the book, “Now We are Six,” a collection of poems about Winnie-th-Pooh and Christopher Robin. Her father was given a copy of the book when he was two, just before his sister was born. Along with helping children to clean the sand from between their toes, reading the poems to them is one of the great pleasures of this life. I’ve don it enough that I have the refrain to the poem memorized, which comes in handy every time I have the opportunity to clean the sand from between the toes of a child.

We had sunny skies and a beautiful day for a picnic at the beach. Our great niece’s father is a wonderful cook and we had a delicious potato salad and a delightful smoked whitefish dip to go with our sandwiches and watermelon. You couldn’t ask for better company. The young family now live in upstate New York so visiting them is a rare treat in our lives. It was one of those very good days that we’ve been fortunate to share. No nor’westers were blowing. We do get weather from the northwest, and walking along the beaches around here in blustery weather is fascinating, but I was glad to have a sunny day for taking children to the beach. I’ve learned over the years that you don’t really need a good nor’wester to blow in order for children to get sand between the toes. On the other hand you don’t need bright sunlight or any particular type of weather for children to shed their shoes at the beach. Even when it is cold, the water is too inviting. When we are lucky we remember boots for the blustery days.

In the afternoon we delivered a pretty tired six year old to her father at the library. Most people get to check out books from the library. We do that, but on occasion, we are also allowed to borrow a child. By the time we returned her she was a bit dirtier than when we got her in the morning. And she was tired. I suspect that she fell asleep in the car on the drive home. And, I’m pretty sure that before she went to bed, there was a bath. After all, even though I tried, I’m confident she still had sand between the toes.