A Trip to the Beach

Sunday we made a quick jaunt to the beach, kind of a last hurrah for our summer. It seems hard to believe but Xy’s vacation is pretty much over, and starting today she’s working to prepare her classroom at her new school.

We always find the ocean waters rejuvenating. Waveland, Mississippi, is less than an hour from downtown New Orleans. The beaches are decent, though the water’s only ankle-deep.

Xy made me float on an inflatable raft for a little while. It was very peaceful. Balm for the soul.

I wish there was a balm for my girl. I wish there was some process, some magic formula that could extract the lead from her body.

We showed her how to scoop sand into her pail. She was so happy to sit and slowly fill up that pail.

Humans have been digging around in the dirt for millennia. Lead is just one of the many things that we’ve extracted from from the earth. So many environmental nightmares are of relatively recent vintage. But some people say lead poisoning contributed to the decline of the Roman Empire.

Still, most of us are carrying around a lot more lead in our bodies today than people did back then. A lot more. We make quite a mess of things, us humans.

You can’t see or taste or smell tiny lead dust particles if they are in your environment. You can only take a swab sample and send it off to a lab and wait.

And there’s absolutely no evidence of poisoning in the girl’s behavior. She seems so happy and healthy. Damage from lead might not show up for years. If, of course, there’s any damage at all, which I sincerely hope there’s not.

It’s all so very intangible.

We got a packet of information from the New Orleans Childhood Lead Poisoning Prevention Program. Amongst the helpful pamphlets was a beer koozie promoting the program. Xy put it to good use there on the beach.