Alki Beach is Seattle's seaside neighborhood, a strip of shoreline in West Seattle where coffee shops, seafood shacks, and arcades sit shoulder to shoulder facing Puget Sound. In winter it breathes slowly, unhurried and local. Come summer it fills to every inch with sun, sand, and the particular joy of a city that earns its warm days.

The morning began at 40 degrees and rough. While setting up, an altercation with a passerby brought the authorities into the picture before the first mark was made. It was an unwelcome start. But the day, to its credit, had other plans.

The horizon was completely closed when I arrived at 8am to begin setting-up, clouds sitting low and flat across the water with no mountains in sight. By ten thirty they began to lift, peeling back from the lower levels, and by eleven thirty the peaks of the Olympics had broken through entirely. Throughout the session the sleepy tides worked their quiet rhythm, exposing sand, accepting footprints, then taking them back again. The whole body of the Sound moved in a shy and winking way, its small waves blinking in the sun like scattered light through old glass. Friends, new and old, drifted by to chat.

As the day closed, the overcast dissolved into wispy threads that gave way to a gradient of orange into blue into teal, the kind of sunset that feels like an apology and an offering all at once.