Tidal Pool

When I was a kid, one of my dreams was to visit the edge of the ocean for I wanted almost more than anything to see the fantasy world of a tidal pool.  I now live only about eight hours away from the ocean, but it may as well be eight years for lack of time or money, yet the finger of a small god digs into my back, saying. "Go."  Ah, it would be a move, but there are close friends in Quincy, Massachusetts who would help me get set up.

Seashells were given to me by my godmother Eleanor, just simple halves of an oyster, a shovel clam, and two kitten paws.  I may still have them from over half a century ago.  A book fair at my elementary school gave me the chance to get, after much pestering of my mother, a book on shells that had pictures of the creatures that also inhabited this planet; they looked nothing like me or any animal that danced for Disney.  Corals, sponges, sea lilies, and nudibranchs undulated in saltwater pictures temporarily corralled by the ebb tides, just waiting for the humans to come and see and wonder.  It's all an understandable wonder.  Not like, say, economics.

The seashell collection grew to cypraeidae and strombidae, cowries and conchs, all spotted or bloodflushed pink.  They now lay in clusters on glass shelves, distinct exoskeletons like nothing else on earth unless you count flower blossoms, unless you count fungi, unless you count the myriad forms of minerals, unless you count the miracle scales on butterfly wings.  Jewels, all.  Wait till the first flush of fungi and I will tell you how beautiful the thing is, with red cap and yellow stem, bruising blue at the touch (Boletus bicolor).

Perhaps I just need to go and see and feel the sting of saltwater on legs, to breathe the air shared by dolphins, to walk up the beach to see the bubbles rise in the sand from the little coquinas, the tiny clams living at the edge of the water.  It calls to me, the ocean, with a primeval tug at whatever part of the brain was once found underwater and gilled.  I don't think I was a fish, but maybe there are some atoms left from being a clam, a whelk, or a volute sliding along the coral floor, teaching little clammies, whelklets, or voluteenies to walk in a straight line.

Bed is bed is now, and I welcome this end of day now dark.  Close the shutters, draw the curtains, slippers on.  The ocean waves curl night and day in the rhythm of pulsation, of all the living things it contains.  Draw in the sand, toes lapped by salt edges of liquid passion, watch the little silver fish as they dash forward to escape.  Night loves you, so do I.