Finding Our Favourite Pebble Horseshoe Again

I was walking beside my partner on our usual naturist beach, getting far too interested in a collection of stones. There were people all along the shore for the public holiday, but I was looking at the little pebble enclosures. Somewhere among those horseshoes was one we already knew. Apparently, a woman can be perfectly relaxed about a beach full of naked people and still get excited about finding the same patch of ground twice.

Our children were away visiting family, so we'd taken the opportunity for another beach day together. This wasn't an introduction to naturism for either of us, and we hadn't come with anything to prove. We liked this predominantly naturist beach already; going back was the easy choice. I wanted the familiar outing, with my partner beside me and no particular achievement required before we could call it a good day.

The holiday had brought plenty of other couples and family groups, with adults spread along the beach around us. Nobody was involved in our little search, or even aware that I had developed an opinion about pebble arrangements. We just walked along together, looking over the low curves of stone. It was busy without causing us any difficulty, which suited me much better than having to make a new plan.

There were lots of these enclosures, not just the one we remembered. Beachgoers had gathered stones washed ashore and arranged them into horseshoes, leaving an opening on one side. Looking along the beach, I could see the same simple idea repeated in slightly different curves. Nothing grand, nothing you could reserve, just little spaces people had made from what was already under their feet. I liked them all, although clearly I had a favourite.

Then I stopped, turned toward one of the horseshoes and pointed. My partner turned with me, and there it was: the familiar little enclosure we'd found before. "That's the one, isn't it?" I said, already pleased before she'd answered. "Yes, it is," she said. There was no rush toward it and no need to claim it ahead of anybody; we'd simply recognised our spot again, and I was grinning at a low line of pebbles.

Calling it our spot makes it sound rather more official than it was. We hadn't built it, we weren't building anything that day, and finding it didn't give us rights over that bit of beach. It was just the one we remembered among all the other horseshoes. Still, I enjoyed that little moment of recognition with her, especially because we both knew what we were looking at without needing a lengthy discussion of stones.

Up close, it was still a small enclosure made from ordinary washed-up pebbles, part of the same collection stretching along the shore. That was the appeal, really: someone had taken the trouble to make a useful little shape, and we'd been lucky enough to find the familiar one again. We looked from its curve to the others nearby. I couldn't have made a convincing case for why this particular horseshoe pleased me more, but there I was, pleased anyway.

Nothing interrupted the discovery, and nobody challenged us or needed us to move. The public-holiday beach carried on around us while we enjoyed having found exactly what we remembered. We'd come back for another easy outing together, and this small bit of luck belonged neatly inside it. My partner glanced at me, I glanced back at the stones, and I had to admit that finding our favourite little horseshoe was enough of a result for me.