Notes from Thalassa, part 1

Notes from Thalassa

 

It feels so great to

Laze about

In basic beauty  . . .

And hope I have something to write about.

I would not have imagined this 3 weeks ago!

I brought with me a diet that resembles Into the Wild—

And we all know how that turned out.

I feel like a Jumblie (Edward Lear) set out to sea. I see now why artists paint it—because it is beyond words. Colors rendered in indigo, sienna, oxide from the earth, ashes to ashes, seed back to seed. The sky a Hopper blue, the dunes mutes, variegated by shades of green, rust, rosa rugosa like a Marsden Hartley painting.

I took a picture. It was all grays with a line across the middle—or, depending upon the day, hour, minute hues of blue, sometimes dotted like an exclamation point with a sail way out there, motionless on the horizon.

I have a vegetative splinter in the palm of my hand from where I fell down running over the sand to the outhouse. It hurts like arthritis in the morning.

I’m on the front deck (there is no back) facing the ocean.

Yes! The Atlantic, the big pond. Who ever coined that phrase lacked imagination because you cannot dream this—this big, the sounds, the peace. Some of it is the typical, what we’ve come to expect. A trawler, its motors chugging at a distance from the shore, the crash of waves, constant, every once in a while one with personality will add an emphasis, but it will melt back into the placid depths. It is Muzak, along with the buzzing of giant bumblebees the size of humming birds that dive bomb and then go off to make merry in the waving sea grasses. And the birds, they sing, chirp, peep, twitter, trilling not that this is new or not done in Chicago, but that I am alive to them.

And, that is the difference. Between the postcard and the actual experience. Wish you were here.

my outhouse with a million dollar view!