We joined our friends Betha and Tom in Indianola for the annual Indianola Days festival. Betha’s parents have a summer place there, and I have been wishing and dreaming for years that we would one day get to join in the summer sand sculpture making.
I haven’t had so much fun since I was a kid! Along with various friends and relations of Betha, Stuart and I helped to build “Edge o’ D’Nile” —which included the Nile River and a number of small boats made from bark, sticks, and grass, with leaf sails; the Sphinx; two pyramids; and a number of hieroglyphic inscriptions.
Part of the fun is watching the advancing waters erase all our vainglorious works.
Ozymandias
I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed:
And on the pedestal these words appear:
“My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!”
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.—Percy Bysshe Shelley (1818)
