Bethany Beach, Delaware, July 23, 2015

★★★★ The sun had gone over to being hot again. Wiffle ball in the driveway by the dumpsters made it to the bottom of the second inning before the catcher resigned and wandered off. A laughing gull was whooping it up on the neighboring roofline. A little bike-riding was essayed; the three-year-old tipped his over and got up unhurt but complaining about the scorching pavement. Down at the beach, in the last hours of lifeguard coverage, the waves were mild and the seabirds exultant. Sun suffused the pale green water, while new swells rose from darker cloudshadow farther out. An osprey flew straight shoreward with heavy wingbeats, clutching a fish so whole and huge and still it might have been picked up from the seafood counter. A pair of pelicans flapped by. Gulls dropped toward the waves in the middle distance and were lost from view. The air was slightly cooler than the water as one back-floated and tried to direct the mind from the unseen depths to the cheery clouds above. A dangling foot found soft sand, the waves having carried the body back to the populated shadows — and a few dozen yards south, to judge by the beachside houses. After dinner, the lowering sun shone straight through the open sides of the trolley, casting shadows of the passengers’ heads out beside the roadway. The grass median looked like astroturf. The trolley floated semi-quietly and some small but distancing height above the usual point of view, rendering the quiet back streets an absorbing spectacle. It was nearly impossible to attend to the mobile phone: The three-year-old called out fireplugs and mailboxes as he spotted them, and the smell of pines came in. The matching faded whiteness of the clouds and the moon diverged, the clouds going pink and the moon acquiring its glow.