Sea Change

"Be careful" my father yells.

 

"Look out for bluebottles, they'll sting you!"

 

My sister and I race onto the sand, oblivious to my father's rough tones.  For a moment I can't keep up.  I take a deep breath and surge forward. The knobbly knees that are the trademark of our family are tanned but strong; our toes cake forks in the wet, gritty sand.  The dunes seem to disappear behind us as my father's voice drifts away, his mouth forming a silent "O" on the wind.

 

This is “our beach” on a perfect summers evening.  Big sis and I are two waifs in shorts and striped T-shirts. Tracy is five years older, her dark hair long and shiny in the last rays of the sun.  Her legs are muscled from her swimming lessons at school. I am seven and her polar opposite. 

 

Blonde and petite, with a little pot-belly, I have just cut my hair short during a rebellious frame of mind.  My angst culminated in the determination to transform my buttock length tresses.  Now it's a Little Lord Fauntleroy, page boy crop. I like it, and then I hate it and cry.

 

We clamber up and onto the rocks that seem so big and sharp under our bare feet.  The tide has long since receded, leaving behind its secret world.  The shallow pools of water nestled between the rocks are teeming with tiny fish, rainbows of sea anemones, spiky urchins, scuttling crabs.  Octopus, starfish, sea cucumbers, alikreukels and sea lettuce play out their lives for us to watch, and poke and prod. 

 

I stick my forefinger into a plum anemone. It closes over my finger and I am filled with giggles that seem to well up from deep in my stomach. I try to find a sea-hare, the little snail that eats sea lettuce. I think this is the greatest fact I have ever learned. 

 

It tickles my imagination and makes me want to tell everybody the secrets that I know.   The roar of the ocean beyond fills my ears, my mother and father tiny figurines in the distance.   I know my father is keeping a watch on the tide.  I know, too, that he is worrying.

 

Tracy and I walk along the sand, lifting seashells to our ears to hear the expected roar and rush that sounds so much like their ocean home.  We find a stranded raft of bluebottles. “Ugh” we recite in unison and leave it alone, wandering on and on along the shore, teasing the waves with our toes, racing in and out of the surf before it catches our ankles. 

 

The fading years seem to catch up with me now.  The memories seem like yesterday and I am once again a little girl, wide-eyed with wonder, marvelling at new worlds.  The rock pools are smaller now, my feet bigger, my eyes need help in seeing clearly into the distance.  But  I am still prancing, wide-eyed, entranced by the natural world. Every beetle, spider, bit of pollen, memory of life, seems to hold me under its spell.

 

Today I was kneeling on the concrete watching ants work.  My knees are still knobbly.  Two things, at least, have not changed.