The sand that stays cool

Here's a thing about Siesta Key that sounds like a tourism brochure lie until you stand on it: the sand doesn't get hot.

It's ninety-nine percent quartz, ground down over a few million years, and it flatly refuses to hold heat the way ordinary sand does. You can cross that beach barefoot at two in the afternoon in July, which anywhere else in Florida is a medical decision. People come off the lot braced for it, take three steps, and you can watch the confusion go across their faces.

I've been here long enough to forget it's unusual. Then somebody visits and does the three-step thing, and stops, and says "wait" — and I remember we're standing on something a little strange and a little perfect.

It's also blinding white, which is why every photo anybody takes out there looks overexposed. That's not your camera. That's just the beach.

I've never written a song about the sand itself, which for a guy whose whole lane is beach country now strikes me as an oversight. Maybe it's that you can't build a chorus out of a mineral composition.

But it's there, it's free, and in September there's nearly nobody on it.

Go stand on it before the season turns and the rest of the world remembers it exists.