I love you salt marshes. I love you mudflats and salt pannes, and all the shorebirds that probe for invertebrates beneath your surface, leaving tracks behind. I love you anoxic sulfur-metabolizing bacteria. I love you Spartina patens, and a thundering dark sky against your windswept plain. I love you fish nursery habitat and wave energy absorber. I love you saltmarsh sparrows, even as you lose a race against time, and I am grateful to have looked into your eyes and seen unrelenting resilience there, confident you won’t go down without a fight. I love you mummichogs, pushing the limits of salt tolerance. I love you Salicornia, like neon pink Christmas trees. I love you mosquito ditch lines, visible reminders etched into your skin of how we have mistreated you and must do better. I love you, sense of serenity standing alone in your rustling grasses as the tide comes in, for a moment imagining the world as it once was, when you covered the whole coast and kept both land and sea bountiful and safe from harm. I love you, enough to work to restore your honor and dignity. I love you, I love you, I love you, salt marsh.