A drift...

 Our family has been migrating to the ocean every year for about six years now.

Our favorite places include Bella Beach on the Oregon coast just outside of Depot Bay and Seabrook, Washington.

 It's my favorite place on earth.  The smell, I would wear it as perfume if I could.  The mix of pine trees, sand,  salt water, the wind, the sunshine (sometimes), the rain (sometimes) is just the best.  I grew up southeast Alaska with very similar surroundings and it just feels right.  The ocean is humbling.  It is powerful and demands respect.  It is endless, ever changing, alive.  It is my idea of true beauty.  And the fact that you put more clothes ON than you take off to hit the beach in the northwest...love.

Every time I come home with  treasures.  Also known as "what is all this sand and junk in the back of the car." A couple of years a go at Seabrook I kept collecting drift wood every time we went down to the beach.  We moved twice and refused to let my husband through my treasured sticks out. 

 We finally made something lovely with them.  The kiddos and I arranged all our treasures from longest to shortest.  Then I drilled a whole in each piece of drift wood.  We lost several doing this part because they were so soft or brittle they broke apart.  Strung twine through all the pieces and now we have a drift wood mobile from the beach.

There's even some sand still hanging on to a few of the pieces of wood.  

I love the soft color of the gray wood, how smooth it looks.  Can't wait to go to the beach this next year.

I feel the need for sand between the toes, pots of homemade soup, drinking hot coffee all day long, and of course collecting more treasures!