I smell good today, and I don’t know why. It’s a pleasant scent coming from me. Nothing false, no perfume or heavily scented soaps, just me. I’m clean under this shirt, under these pants, inside my shoes. I’m clean in the way of knowing my own scent for the first time in so very long. There is nothing overpowering in it, just earthen shores laid bare. And the sea so often carries a hint of decay in its mist. It’s acrid, no matter how pure. And how welcoming that smell some days, how peaceful and full. There are cycles made whole there at the shore, where the ocean meets land. The sand sometimes a fine silt, sometimes gritty and coarse. It all depends on the point at which one stands, the tilt of ones head, and the sharpness of ones eyes.
We used to go to the beach every summer when I was a child. Each year I’d be given a plastic shovel, bucket, and some sort of mold meant for making sand castles. One year, we went to a new beach. I couldn’t dig under the sand far enough to find the water (because we all know one needs water to mingle with sand in order for it to stick…not too much and not too little…very Goldilocks!). That year, I found a pipe about a ten yards from where my parents had rented an umbrella. The pipe was spewing out water from origins unknown. It was not ocean water, but runoff or pool water…something that didn’t belong on the beach. In the sand were ants and pine needles…a sight I found distressing as a five-year-old who was accustomed to beaches full of seashells and a pure medium.
I spent all day walking back and forth the distance between my parents and the pipe. All day I spent filling my little plastic bucket, carrying the water to the hole I’d dug, and filling it with the water. I would be pleased to see the water in the hole and run back to the pipe, fill my bucket again, and come back to emptiness. The water would seep through the sand. Never was there enough to satisfy it, quench it in such a way as for it to leave any for play, for creation, for that which I found soothing. There was no easiness in that beach. There was nothing on it meant for me. The ocean pulled so far out during low tide, the ripples beneath revealed more sand, hungry in the way of the never satisfied. It waited, it seemed, to take the water from my bucket, as well.
But it was in that that I erred. The ocean and the sand wanted nothing from me, nor did they offer me anything. There was nothing inherently in either of them that was part of me or apart from me. I was feeding that which was and resting my head in the nape of my own lap. There was nothing to sate, nothing to quench, only me stretched ever onward and resting in a repose unfamiliar and so known. And why in December, in a place so far from the shore I once knew so well, am I again five, spanning such a tiny distance from this point to that, trying to fill a hole with water that seeps through sand? Time that seeps through space? And familiars that are both a part of me and apart from me?
(December 20, 2007)
No comments:
Post a Comment