Sand is a time capsule.
Every grain tells a story.
Sand can be anything that's been worn down
until it's reduced to some tiny essential fragment
of what it once was.
It's a technical term.
Bigger than sand? That's gravel.
Smaller? Silt.
Go to beaches across the world
and you find sand that looks completely different.
If you could take
a single grain of sand from every beach
you would have a history of the world
pinched between two fingers.
A hundred years ago,
a pebble chipped off a slab of granite
in the Sierra mountains.
It was dragged by the current
of the Sacramento River
through the Delta, out the Golden Gate
and onto the beaches of San Francisco.
Sometimes, sand is a graveyard,
full of dead bodies.
This is the shell of a tiny foram,
a single celled organism
whose skeletons litter the bottom of the ocean.
This sand? Almost entirely coral.
This one, shards of lava from a Hawaiian volcano.
This tiny nugget of quartz tumbled down
the waterways of Appalachia,
all the way to the beaches of Florida.
By the time it got there, it had worn down
to the consistency of sugar.
Time takes a big thing, and makes it small.
But sometimes the opposite can happen.
Behold, ooid.
The only sand that accretes
rather than erodes.
Think snowball effect.
A tiny speck of brine shrimp poop
is tossed and turned on the ocean floor
accumulating minerals like calcium,
until it's a grain of sand the size of a pin tip.
Sand is a snapshot in time,
a stopping point between the very big
and the very small,
the landlocked,
and the oceanic.