The pelicans left first. They always do. They took the sky with them and called it wisdom.

A Loggerhead stayed in the warm water off Juno, fat with a summer of jellyfish, and listened to the wind change its mind. The sea grape on the dune clapped its leaves like a warning. The ghost crabs nailed their doors shut with sand.

“Come up,” said the Sea Grape. “The gulf is going to stand on its hind legs.”

“I have a nest to make,” said the Loggerhead. “And the nest is made of this beach, not some other one.”

The storm arrived the way storms arrive here: as if it had always owned the place and was only now collecting rent. It took the umbrellas. It took the easy sand. It took a pier that had been getting too proud. It also took the top off the beach, the way a hand takes a blanket, and laid the older shore out in the sun: coquina, black glass, a tooth older than the town, and a piece of Spanish silver nobody had been looking for because nobody had been willing to wait.

In the morning the pelicans came back and argued over a fish.

The Loggerhead came up at dusk, slow as a promise, and laid her eggs in the new sand the storm had made.

A Ghost Crab watched from a doorway that had to be dug twice.

“You sat in all that,” he said. “Most storms take more than they give.”

“Most storms do,” she said. “This one was doing bookkeeping. It put the old world back on the counter and asked who was still here to sign for it.”

She covered the nest. The beach, which had looked ruined at noon, looked like a beginning at dark.