Clump #36: De-Clump blue beach bag.

Day Five of the 30-day, 30-clump, 30-post challenge.  I’m getting tired … stay tuned!

I love the word unfettered.  Free, unencumbered … joyful, even.  It’s how I should feel about this beach bag.  A container for a towel, a book, flip-flops, and not much else.  Instead, I weighed it down with a ton of unattended-to mail, magazines, and the like.

I’m not going to sugar-coat the story … this clump was rough.  So much tedious raking and combing through old, neglected papers.  In the middle of the pile, Oprah was there to cheer me on, smiling and proclaiming how happy I would be when I got through it.  Thanks, I needed that!

And, yes, I did eventually reach the bottom.  Hallelujah!  Note the diminished sunlight.

Empty?  Not quite.  There was something lurking in the bag’s pocket: seashells and sand.  As it should be.

Thinking about beaches and being weighed down reminded me of the time we were visiting the New Jersey shore and saw this horseshoe crab. The poor thing was washed up on the sand, burdened for who knows how long with moochers stuck to its shell.

Here’s a close-up (without my finger in the top left corner).

One of the joys of going on vacation is getting away from all of our stuff.  The feeling of being unfettered for a while, and if you’re lucky, cleaned and cleared with a wave’s ebb and flow.