Picnic Point

Briana has been taking her kids to a beach on the Sound lately to hunt for crabs, and yesterday morning Jack and I joined them. We took some buckets, shovels and plastic measuring cups and began disturbing the crabs like nobody's business. You can't see them terribly well in the picture, but we found lots. At one point it looked like the entire bottom of the bucket was gently shifting around, but it was just the collective scuttling of the crab community we'd put in there. After a while I looked down and the bucket had stopped moving; I looked closer and saw only one tiny crab left on the bottom where minutes before there had been dozens. "Who took all my crabs?" I asked. Cyril, reluctant to lie but equally as unwilling to incriminate himself, stood frozen staring at me with a funny look on his face, as if dumbfounded that a grownup cared about how many crabs were in her bucket. "Put them back, Cyril," Briana said. He slowly fished several of the smallest crabs he could find out of his bucket and put them back in mine. I noticed that he kept my prize crab, a chubby green guy with white pincers, but I decided to take the high road and act like I was in fact 18 years older than my crab-pilfering nephew. If you look very carefully, you can see a reddish-brown crab and one that's half-gay and half-white. You scored extra points for finding anything other than the all-green kind.