“Not there. Here,” Sandra chided. I wondered why it mattered but acquiesced to her demands, upending the bucket and scooping up more wet sand before planting it down on her desired location.

“More! Water.” She was busy being the architect, carefully sculpting the walls of her desired construct the way children do: haphazardly with a shovel.

A father’s duty is to mollify his child’s demands, and so I dutifully trotted back to the ocean and pulled up another bucket of sea water to be spread around Sandra’s sand renovation. To prepare wet sand for building is no easy task; water is heavy on multiple trips!

But this time, the trot was – felt – shorter. On the third trip I remembered why as I knelt to fill the bucket.

“Sandra? The tide is coming in.”

I wanted it to be my last trip, and so I scolded her gently, hoping she would understand and agree that it was time to go. By then, the sand castle had it all. Four towers, four walls, a gate and a small moat. The irony didn’t escape me, where pleasing one’s daughter is like trying to fill a sand castle’s moat.

However, she wasn’t finished. Sandra looked at me and pointed to the dry moat. I obediently emptied the water bucket for the third time into the moat and watched the water sink into the thirsty sand.

“That’s all we should do today, Sandra. Are you ready to go?”

Standing up and looking at her creation from a higher vantage point, she pointed with her shovel again. “No done! Water more.”

I started to reason with her, but a child’s mind, once set, becomes immovable. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw the tides coming in , creeping wave by wave to our recently built real estate.

Realizing the inevitability, I resolved to let the natural course of things teach my daughter in my stead.

And so, I went to get more water.

Just like the sunset, the tides move faster than one expects. Three trips later, the moat no longer needed my water assistance as Sandra was putting the finishing touches regarding the fourth tower’s roofing.

Unlike real locations, our castle’s architect had not scoped out the extent of the tides’ uprising beforehand. And soon, the waves crept in.

Ever the protective father, I swung Sandra up and placed her upon my shoulders, hefting the bucket in my other hand.

“The tide is here, honey. It’s time to go home, okay?”

I winced as Sandra smacked me twice, then a third time on the side of my head with her shovel. “No, daddy. Look. Castle!”

“I know, I know. The castle is disappearing, because the tides are coming, and –”

But she kept hitting my head in earnest, and so I turned around to look at the castle, just in timed to see the waves engulf the highest tower.

The waves retreated immediately at my gaze, leaving the milky froth of sea water spinning around inside the castle’s walls. But their mark of passing was clearly evident. What was once a moat was now just a small dip in the land. What was once the eastern bulwark was now just a small hill.

I then noticed that the waves that hastened time had brought more than just froth and change. Atop a wall laid the remnants of seaweed draped like ivy vines across an old courtyard. The roof that Sandra had so painstakingly carved out with just the tip of her shovel stood atop the crumbled tower, etchings still intact.

“Look daddy. Castle. Castle!” Sandra laughed and whooped even as her creation succumbed to the ebbs of tides.

I smiled through the ringing pain of her incessant shovel bashing. I had tried to teach my daughter that the tides will come.

But that day, as I stood there with her on my shoulders, watching that sand castle disappear under knee-deep water, I realized what I think she already knew. That it didn’t matter at all.

After all, like other things, it was just a sand castle.