We're sitting on the beach and I plop down on the sand and lay back.
"Lee you're getting all sandy!" friend says. "Sit down on the blanket."
I spread my arms and legs and make snow angels in the sand.
"Oh my god," she says. "What is the matter with you."
"I love being all sandy." I tell her.
And with this simple statement my mind is drawn away where it settles upon a powerful memory...
...Where I'm on a different beach. Years ago.
I'm with my aunt who has terminal cancer.
"The sand's grittier here than it is in New Jersey," I remember telling her.
She's wearing a black one-piece swimsuit and she forgot to put her one fake boob in and so there's a dip on the one side where her cancer-riddled flesh was removed.
I have a small beach towel that I picked up at one of the Corpus Christie surf shops for $5 and I spread it out and I sit on it.
She sits next to it and stretches out full upon the sand on her back.
"Anna! Your back's all sandy!" I tell her. "Sit on the towel."
"I love the sand," she says. She drags her limbs across the sand, making a snow angel, and squints up toward the sky because the sun is bright.
"I won't be able to feel the sand soon, so it doesn't bother me, Leelee," she said, giggling at the new nickname she just gave me.
Her arms and legs scissor as she swings them across the sand, deepening the impression.
I look over to her, feeling a fresh sadness rush through me. She's right, I think. She won't be able to feel the sand one day. Or anything. She'll be gone from this world and from all of us.
"I love the sand," she says.
I lay down on my back and look up.
The beauty of her simple comment hung upon the air.
Of course she loves the sand.
She loves the body that she lives in this world with, and its sensations are all that much more precious because she won't live long in it.
I hate that she'll be gone soon.
She is the most incredible person, the kind who breezes into a room of strangers and walks out with new friends.
She was always talking, laughing, smiling and I remember as a kid I just thought it was because she had some special kind of magic that she worked on people to make them happy.
When she'd babysit me everything was an adventure--fun, loud and colored by laughter.
She would take my sister and I across the orange-red sand of a Texas plain and we'd pick out white rocks and she'd hold them up and call them Indian arrow heads and we'd be completely thrilled.
Or if we were driving, she'd stop the pickup truck and pull over to rescue a wayward turtle that was baking on the asphalt in the southern heat.
She interrupts my thoughts.
"The air smells good!" she says, taking deep breaths of salt-drenched seabreeze.
I think about how she's here, right now still appreciating every little thing around her in spite of the cruel death sentence that fate has meted out.
Somehow, she's found a way to chase away the gloomy curtain that hangs over people near death with her smiles, her laughter, her energy.
She knows that she's dying, but she still jokes about her blond wig, dances for no reason spontaneously and belts out bits of country songs with a voice that would shame some professional singers.
"Do you have the sunblock?" she asks me. "I need to put some my bald head so I don't burn it."
"I have tanning spray?" I offer.
"No, that'll make all my hair too oily," she says, fingering a baby thin wisp of hair that has started to grow back.
She laughs and then I laugh too.
And then she gets up, a cloud of sand flying all over.
"Let's jump in the water!" She says, reaching out and grabbing my hands to hoist me up.
"I'm not wearing my suit!" I tell her.
"So what!" she yells over her shoulder as she runs toward the breaking waves.
I look down at my boardshorts and tank top-- and lope on after her.
There's so much life in her you can't believe that she lives so close to death.
My memory ends here and I'm brought back to the present. Where I'm at a beach in New Jersey at twilight and my friend is looking at me funny because I'm flat on my back in the sand with it sticking all over my skin.
Anna left me this legacy:
Instead of being annoyed with the sand, I cherish the very simple fact that I'm able to feel it.
That rough gritty texture against the skin of my body reminds me to appreciate the reality that I'm young, I am healthy and I AM alive.
It doesn't seem like much, but I remember it every time I lay in the sand.
And so I'll always love the sand.