ABSTRACT
Once, at a time of great stress in my life, I bought a cottage on a salt marsh south of Boston. I found the tidal rhythms infinitely soothing, a reminder that life was not structured by semesters or fiscal years. Twice every day the tides flush the channels, making silvery little waterways in what otherwise looks like a meadow. Seabirds-especially seagulls but also egrets, herons, cormorants, and ducks-swim in it, rest on it, or circle around the marsh, fishing. When an especially high tide comes in, the channels fill to overflowing; twenty-five times or so in the course of the year, particularly in the winter when the tides are deepest, the marsh floods into a little lake.
