The astonishing resilience of my beach paradise

Malindi

  I could measure my whole life in the summers I’ve spent on the beach in front of our family’s seaside house on Kenya’s north coast. Walking along the white sand, eyes down among the flotsam, seaweed, cuttlebones and ghost crabs, for decades I have been finding shards of blue and white porcelain washed up from some lost wreck. I like to imagine they are from one of 15th-century Chinese explorer Zheng He’s ships, which carried a live giraffe back from the East African coast to the emperor in his capital. I wonder if in a lifetime I might find enough broken pieces to make an entire bowl. That seems as likely as making all my plans in life come together, but year after year I keep finding the shards. I have a photo of me as a small boy following my father on this beach, stretching to step inside his big footprints.