There’s this thing about the ocean, and the whooshing of the wind, and the froth on the beach and the way the footprints fill with water and disappear that is so soothing. And no matter what it was before, what it becomes is nothing important, and it just washes out to sea.
I’m a farm girl, and the beach was only a place we visited during the school holidays, and very occasionally on the weekend. I remember collecting abalone off the reef with my Dad, burning my feet on the sand on the way back to the car, being so freezing during swimming lessons I thought my teeth would chatter out, but then always having a chocolate coated ice-cream afterwards to make it OK. It’s a whole nother story about how I also loved the bush, and the silence or the wind whooshing through the trees and the smell of dry grass and summer. But once I left the farm, everywhere else I have lived has had a beach, and today, when it was too late to work anymore, but too early for baths and dinner and bed, the beach was the only answer.
At the beach a noisy child isn’t noisy, she’s alive and excited and vivacious and free. At the beach the dog isn’t bored and barking at other bored dogs down the street. She’s fast, ears back, joyous, wet and free. At the beach the phone doesn’t ring and the washing doesn’t need folding and there’s no “to do” list awaiting something that today isn’t going to deliver. At the beach the air is fresh, like salt and seaweed and sand, and I’m fun, exploring, energetic, alive and free. At the beach the troopy isn’t old and rusty and noisy – she’s a mean, lean beach machine, and she just cruises. That’s what she was made for. At the beach his day disappears, even just for a bit, and it’s just us, and the ocean.
Sometimes I make things so complicated, when in the end it’s not. And even if it is, once I let it go, it doesn’t have to mean all the things I make it mean. It feels like I don’t have much to write tonight. Maybe it’s that simple.
And there are a thousand stories I want to write, and all the pieces of my day that made bloggable moments, but in the end everything I would have written before the beach just washed out to sea.
And all that’s left is this.
Beautiful and so very, very true!! xxx
I agree I walk every morning on Cable Beach here in Broome and it just starts the day right, it is so beautiful.
I know exactly what you mean. Sometimes you just have to abandon the chaos of life and just hang out somewhere that calms your soul.
As your new kind of M-I-L I’m enjoying getting to know you through this blog. And happy my boy is your guy.