The Stone Stacker

I walked a winter beach where the tide had pulled back, leaving dark sand ribbed and gleaming. The sky hung low and gray, threatening rain but holding back. Seabirds wheeled overhead, their calls sharp against the wind. The ocean breathed its steady rhythm, wave after wave folding onto shore, pulling back, returning. The cold air carried salt and seaweed, and my footprints filled with water as soon as I passed.

Driftwood littered the high tide line – bleached logs, tangles of rope, bottles worn smooth as gems. I walked between tide pools where small crabs scuttled and anemones pulsed like tiny hearts. The beach stretched empty in both directions, a place of edges where land met water, where summer had given way to winter’s sterner beauty. The solitude felt vast and clean.

Near a cluster of dark rocks, a woman worked with complete absorption. She was stacking stones – balancing them one atop another in impossible towers that defied gravity and wind. Some stacks rose waist-high, built from smooth beach stones in graduated sizes. Her hands moved with slow precision, testing each placement, feeling for the point of perfect balance. She must have felt my approach but didn’t look up. “They won’t last,” she said simply.

I watched her work, mesmerized by the patience it required. Each stone needed to find its exact placement, that single point where weight and balance met. Sometimes she’d get five or six stones high before the stack would tremble and fall, and she’d begin again without frustration. “The tide comes in every day,” she said. “Takes them all back. Every single one.”

I asked why she bothered if they wouldn’t survive. She looked at me then, her eyes reflecting the gray sea. “That’s exactly why it matters,” she said. She handed me a smooth stone, warm from her hands. “Nothing we make lasts forever. But we make it anyway. We balance what we can, while we can.” Together we built a tower, stone upon stone, feeling for that perfect point where impossible became briefly possible.

When we finished, she gathered her coat and walked up the beach without looking back. I stayed until the tide turned, watching water inch closer to our careful work. The first wave that reached our tallest stack toppled it gently, stones tumbling back to sand. One by one, the towers fell and scattered, returned to the randomness they’d been borrowed from. But walking home as rain finally began to fall, I carried the weight of something more lasting than stone – the understanding that beauty needs no permanence, that the making itself is the meaning, that we build our careful balances knowing the tide will come.