The grass is dead but standing. That’s what salt marsh grass does in winter — it doesn’t fall. It goes the color of wheat, then past wheat to the color of old receipts, and stays there through the cold months, each stalk running water down to roots the tide has never once surprised.
The tide has been out since morning. The mud is exposed: not dark mud but gray-brown that dries at the edges to something almost white where salt has crystallized. A great blue heron stands at the channel’s bend and has been standing there for forty minutes. This is not patience as a virtue. This is patience as a body plan.
February light in a place like this is flat. The sun barely clears the treeline and doesn’t warm anything, only illuminates — the spartina throwing shadows east, precise enough to tell time by. A kingfisher crosses the channel at water level and doesn’t pause. The heron doesn’t acknowledge it.
There’s a sound under the wind: the creek talking to itself, and below that, where salinity has kept the surface from fully hardening, a sound like paper being folded in another room. Ice thinning in a language nobody named.
What grows here: the cordgrass, the glasswort gone to sticks, the wrack deposited in lines that mark the high water like a record of every tide that came before. What lives here: fiddler crabs in their burrows with their one oversized claw folded against them in the cold. Ribbed mussels in the mud, filtering whatever the water brings because that is what they do, have done, will do. The worms nobody sees turning the sediment — ten thousand years of this particular turning, since the sea rose and made this place out of what was dry.
The heron strikes. Comes up with something silver that catches the flat light once before it’s gone.
Then stillness reassembles.
The tide is turning now — you can see it at the narrows where the water begins to move back slow, and the mud starts to disappear again under what covers it twice a day without fail, taking away the salt crystals and the heron’s footprints and whatever was briefly visible. By dusk this will be water. The grass will stand in it, rooted to something you can’t see from the bank, connected to something you’d have to go down into to understand.
It will look like the grass is floating.
It is not floating.