On a walk one morning last week, I took my pup down to a marshy cove not far from my home. A bike path snakes along the contours of the marsh, and we usually stick to that wide path on our walks. But on this day, the last day of winter, I decided to change up our routine. We descended past the path and down onto the matted grasses of the marsh, crunching far enough out to breathe in the mud of the receding tide but still close enough to shore to keep our feet dry.

Aster, my dog, loves our occasional visits to this part of the cove, and I love watching him enjoy it, though I am also wary of the discarded needles, broken bottles, and other sharp debris that settles along that edge. I kept my eyes to his paws, so focused on scanning for these hazards that I was surprised to, instead, find the domed head and goggled eyes of a horseshoe crab. The discarded shell lay light and flat on the matted grasses, bedazzled in a thin crust of frost that winked in the warmth of the rising sun.

Aster heard the crackle of the shell as I picked it up, and forced his nose into my palm to investigate. Not wanting him to crush it, I tossed it aside, but that only encouraged him more. He lunged and grabbed the delicate thing in his mouth, whipping his head around. I wrangled it free, threw it further out of his reach, and then carried on walking, disappointed not to be able to relish the moment any longer.

But before I could sink too deep into my disappointment, I spotted another domed head and pair of goggled eyes staring up at me from the matted grass. I bent down to take a closer look and found another one right next to it, both the same khaki color of the grass itself, as if they had all been painted from the same swatch.

I played it cool and kept walking, not wanting to pull Aster's attention to these new finds. As I walked, though, I spotted another. Then another. I counted two dozen in just as many steps, all strewn and glistening with rhinestones of frost. The remnants of a family, perhaps, who had grown too large for their shells and had, in that growth, softened and molted and left their old armor behind.

I was familiar with these animals and their life cycles because I had interned at an aquarium as a teenager. On busy summer mornings, I would plunge my hand into the icy waters of the touch tank and tenderly lift up the hulking bodies of the horseshoe crabs, stroke their smooth backs and dutifully extend my arm out to whomever arrived in front of the tank. "Would you like to touch?" I would ask, the scrambling legs dripping water into the basin below.

The young visitors usually grew close as their adults shrieked and recoiled. "They look menacing," I would calmly say, "but they are actually very gentle. See?" I would then stroke the leathery back and spiny legs and recite my favorite horseshoe crab trivia. That they have 10 eyes. That they have blue blood. That their blue blood helps scientists make vaccines. But the real crowed pleasing piece of trivia was that these animals were living fossils. That they had existed for some 450 million years, since before dinosaurs had lived here, and that they have looked pretty much the same through all of that time.

I didn't have any context for 450 million years back then. All I knew about that timeframe was the absence, then presence, and then absence again of dinosaurs. I didn't know that horseshoe crabs first emerged into a world without any leaves or stems, that they witnessed the rise of plants and animals on land and the very first fur to unfurl from wombs. I didn't know that this species had survived all five of the biggest mass extinctions in Earth history, withstanding not only an asteroid impact but also ocean acidifications, firestorms, mass poisonings—all the while molting, growing, and molting again.

With a bit more of that context now, I can sink that much deeper into the novelties of my morning walks. I can find a horseshoe crab shell and recognize it not only as something physically beautiful, but as a physical reminder that the world doesn't just end when things fall apart. That the tides keep ebbing and flowing, Earth keeps spinning, life keeps emerging. That horseshoe crabs keep growing too large for their shells, crawl out into the harsh world, harden and then soften to it once again.

Pre-Order Strata: Stories from Deep Time

I am so excited for the official launch celebration of Mother, Creature, Kin by Chelsea Steinauer-Scudder, coming up on April 9 at 6:30pm at Back Cove Books. Come on out to celebrate this brilliant book and human!

I am also beyond delighted to be part of an Earth Day celebration at SPACE Gallery, coming up on April 22 at 7pm. I’ll be moderating a conversation with authors Brandon Keim and Cara Giaimo, and then enjoying a performance from Cara’s band, sidebody. Please come and join the party:

Finally, in honor of the first week of spring, I’m sharing this poem that I wrote a few years ago at this time:

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