JULIET BY THE SEA (2012)
Birthday Letter
I see ducklings scurrying; chivvied by their mother. they’re all bouncy; curious. It’s like they are a constant babble of wittering, A “what’s here? And here? And what about that?”
I see signets floating serenely in the river where it meets the harbour. The two parents fly low over the bridge, their wings whooping, the spray flies as they skid into the water. They turn and paddle downstream with the current to their offspring, while we watch from a distance.
Where the river meets the sea, the peat black water mixes with the greeny white of the ocean. Pale jelly fish bob silently and dark leaves twirl slowly over and over.
At this junction I sit on the huge rusty bollard, watch the slow fetch of the waves and the blink of the lighthouse on the far coast. I listen to my Ipod; listen to my thoughts, hunch in my jacket, watch the busy ducklings, the ragged crows flying back inland. I think of that jumble of family, where thoughts are precious, silence golden and I feel a gleam of pleasure in solitude.
I celebrate the heron that stalks the shore; a silent anti-social menace silhouetted against the fading gold of the sunset; the soft lap of black and silver waves, the rhythm of the flow of the floating seaweed in the suck and ebb of the ocean. I watch it lumber into the sky, it’s huge wings flapping painfully against the sky. I say; yes to the quiet room, the yellow glow of the lights, the papers strewn over the floor, the bed where no one argues about who is stealing whose covers and I think I am free to flow into the dark sky where my thoughts are my own at last.
I think of your painfully pitched tent above the beach in Durness, when the mist is still there and the grass is wet and the sun is beginning to warm the canvass. I think of lifting the flap of the tent to see you all cuddled in together in a mass of blankets and downies; wee smiles, brown arms and shoulders. Arms and legs everywhere. A whole bundle of puppies and their parents, blinking in the morning, getting ready to tumble on the grass, create chaos as breakfast is made, smiling, frowning, pressing faces into hips and pushing into books in the yellow converted school bus where there is space to be free for brief moments. I think of that and I say to myself “That is good too!” I think of that and think “Yes I could miss that.”
I remember when Cora insisted I push her pram instead of her mother, I can’t remember what I did to deserve such an honour and in some ways I regret it, as the pram wheels dug into the soft sand of the beach. I think of Cora stood still on the beach as her mother and sister and the dog disappeared up the beach, over the rocks that the pram cannot manage. She, stood stock still in the bitter wind, with sand rushing over her purple boots; her face screwed up in the horror of abandonment until eventually, she took my hand and we tottered towards home with the wind battering our backs. I remember her wide smile when Molly burst up to her pram, all out of breath and smothered her with her wild hair and kisses and I thought, soon we will be home and it will be time for me to go somewhere else.
I remember perching by rock pools with Calum; filling a beach bucket with surprised and angry crabs. I was telling him the story of when Richard was his age and we caught crayfish in the local stream, how one of them caught his finger and dangled from it by its pincer while his face went white and red at the pain.
Today I am far from the sea. The sun is melting the frost from the fields. The mountains are white and I think of your wish to return to Scotland; to the woods and the hills, the elderberry champagne, the wilderness therapy of your friends and the mingling of a community which once made up your home.
I think of my own home by the sea and remember that the shells and pieces of wood that decorate my windowsill are still hung up in their canvass bag under the stairs from when I was hiding them from the dog I was looking after and I realise that I am also finding a new community. We called it the ‘Nairn vortex’ where passions run high and nothing is quite as it seems and I twist in circles on its periphery, smiling all the while, with the long beaches waiting to celebrate my breath in the cold winter afternoons.
I think of the meeting of the land and the sea. Of the streams and rivers that tumble and slip from the hills to the wide ocean. I think of the way we all find unexpected routes to the sea and how, sometimes, we meet unexpected obstacles. How a river silts up or an oxbow lake is formed and leaves a whole range of experience to drain away and dry up and then grow new memories in the rich silt of its history.
I think of when we visited Spey bay where your friends work in the Whale centre. Of how the river mouth wanders along the coast. I think of the river Findhorn at Randolph’s leap and the marker a good twenty feet above the water line, showing the heights of the floods of a century ago.
I look at the ducks with their parents and then I think of the sandpipers running in and out with the waves and the artic terns with their ethereal beauty. In think of sand martins jinking over the sea and along the beach at Findhorn where the Nimrods used to roar and I realise that you probably still think you are a raven or an eagle soaring in realms of discovery and wonder.
I think of your shiatsu massage for people giving birth and the guide of your company with women at this time and I wonder if you are wise and still like the seal that bobs in the waves offshore with its old, soft eyes. The seals that, sometimes we see, twisting in the surf of the waves that thunder on the beach in a gale.
I think of you and I remember how you were born on my birthday and I was told that you were my special birthday present and how I wasn’t taken in and wished I’d been given some other presents too.
I remember swinging you way up in the air as we walked along the beach together; your small hands clutched between Richard’s and mine. I remember running along the hard sand , your feet only occasionally touching the ground, your giggles and excitement.
I remember how we loved you so much and how now you remember the times we bullied you and mistreated you and told you stories when we sailed over the diamond glittering sea that made you frightened to go to sleep and how we thought we were so funny and loving and how you didn’t quite notice the fun or the love.
I remember waiting on the harbour arm at Plymouth; staring out to sea waiting for Dad’s boat to come in, with the newspapers and the television cameras and the futile trips to the information centre. I remember thinking that I would have to leave school to look after you and your mum and wondering what job I could do. I remember watching your puzzled face. I remember my anger as I thought I would push the first cameraman that filmed you into the dirty water below.
I remember so much and so little and, walking along the shore in the space between the division of the land and the sea. I know you so little: My birthday present that I took for granted and left for years at a time. I walk along the shore line and look at the twisted logs on the shore, the heaps of leaves, the cans and the plastic bottles, the dead birds and the dried up crabs, the sea glass and delicate clam shells, the hidden pennies, the bladder wrack that we used to love to pop when on holiday and I think these are the sketchy memories of a past we only just shared.
I think how sometimes I forget which child is which and how I get frustrated that one partner was called Dave and another David and I just can’t remember which is which. I remember, with guilt, that I don’t know the surnames of all your children and then I think of the times when we do speak on the phone and my words flow and we begin to re-establish a connection that will ebb and flow with time and how I will continue to gather the prettiest shells from the sea shore and decorate my shelves with them.
One day the shelves will overflow and I will start a new collection of memories that find themselves tangled with the present; swirling with the seaweed in the sea, swishing over the sand with the soft waves and sometimes crunching under foot to turn into one of the billions of grains of sand that we walk over daily.
(Photo: Charlotte's Scallop Shells 11 2020)
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