Glitter

We sat on the beach house porch, watching the rising sun settle in. We knew it would be another scorcher, the sweat already trickling down our backs. The girls balanced their breakfast bowls on their knees, each one lost in thought or just eating.

“My favorite time to see the ocean is the morning. It always glitters,” Wren shared out of nowhere.

All of our eyes shifted to see the glitter.

I pulled out my phone to capture Wren’s words. I always love when one of the kids notices something on their own. Adi’s recently been using the word beautiful a lot, to describe the sky, a particularly green lawn, or treasure found at the beach.

As I jotted Wren’s words, I found myself counting syllables. Had she accidentally created a Haiku? Not quite.

But later that morning, as we went inside to prepare for a day down at the beach, I jotted Wren’s words down on paper. “Come here,” I called to her. “I want to teach you something.” I quickly explained the structure of a Haiku poem and started drawing line breaks in her words to show her what I was talking about.

Wren caught on quickly and grabbed the marker I had been writing with, to try on her own. I watched her count syllables on her fingers. I offered a few suggestions, but she had her own ideas. She worked quietly for a few minutes before revealing her poem:

My favorite time

Is when the ocean glitters

In the mornings blue