An amazing woman I know has set off on foot in search of the Spring, on a journey that will take her from, Helmsley in North Yorkshire, to Saltburn by the sea. You can follow her progress here. I am full of admiration for what Caroline's doing, knowing I could never embark on this kind of venture. I often feel guilty about my lack of interest in walking in this rather cold, northern landscape. I wonder if it's in part because I grew up in a seaside town, and in the town or by the sea, is always where I would choose to walk.
The sea has been on my mind this week as it has just arrived in my memoir project. I've been pairing the writing down, trying to find a distillation that is meaningful. Trying to curb my tendency to get carried away with description and place. But the sea is important in this story. I know it will resurface again and again in the writing,
Here are a few paragraphs - (Bridie is the name I give my grandmother - I am changing all names apart from mine.)
You cannot grow up by the sea and not hear its sibilant whisper in the shell of your ear. You cannot fail to taste its salt on your skin, to smell an incoming tide on the wind. Living by the sea, you are always looking to the horizon and beyond. There is comfort in its rhythm and its constancy. You find yourself there. It inhabits your dreams in all its seasons.
Summer -dawn breaks to a morning like milk, and the salty lick of the tide swelling in the bay, lapping at the edge of the dunes, invites you into its pearly waters. By early evening, the gulls circle and mewl, calling you back. The second high tide of the day, and the whole town is out on the beach, playing in the waves.
Winter - a storm breeches the sea wall, and a tide weighted with mud and kelp, runs down through the town, through College Street, Princess Street, it runs across the pub yard, slips under the back gate and up over the flood step, into Bridie's kitchen. Tomorrow she will sweep the kelp and the tiny shells, the black driftwood and the bleached bones of sea creatures, from her back yard.
Where did you grow up? How would you represent it, in its seasons?
Thanks for reading
Avril x
See, Avril, that's your gift, you do it every time. From the universal full of promise- beyond the ocean's horizons, to the particular- sweeping up bones from under the door. It bet even your shopping list is a work of art! Hmm, for myself, the place I grew up, the cynic in me would call it a perennial hole where one defecates! But Like your ocean, I grew up near a wood. And how it changed throughout the seasons seeped into my bones. Then- it was a feeling, a sanctuary. Now- I probably have a little Latin to name some of the wild flower-swell which stipples the scrub. And I guess my time frame wouldn't quite be summer/winter, but how it appears to me man/boy. Like a kaleidoscope, the same primary colours, but a turn of age, foregrounds a varied presentation.
Beautiful writing, Avril. Wonderfully evocative and poetic.