Sometimes when I swim in the sea the waves are so big it is hard to keep your balance. If I relax and roll with it and stay close to shore I am usually ok. I love this feeling of standing on my feet on the sand and this big wave coming at you and you are about to get knocked over...maybe. I like lifting my body up and swimming towards it and getting washed over.

On another day I will go out there and it will be perfectly still. Deep blue with brown under my feet and I can look down to the ground and see everything. This is the sea, ever changing.

Last night it roared all night. The wind was off shore. It is still going this morning. crashing against the rocks  all fierce and wild. The other morning it was lapping at the shore so gently you had to be still to hear it. The birds were singing over it.

The sea is full of personality. Changing. Shifting. You never know what to expect when you meet it. It is never the same from one day to the next. Even its base shifts here from season to season. Huge boulders move and where there once was sand now there is rocks. 

You have to get to know it all over again every summer. And that's good with me.

When the tide is in in the morning, I swim for ten minutes or so before I walk. I forget from year to year what it is like to meet the sea first thing in the morning.

I feel so small in the vastness of it.

And I I feel full of wonder. I look across the bay to the other shore and wonder if someone is swimming over there too in the quiet of the morning.

Sometimes I swim at night in the moonlight. Then I think I am in a painting. The amber lights of the little cottages along the shore and the creamy yellow circle in the deep blue above me. Sometime life is a painting that no one has ever made and there you are in the centre of it. Sometimes the moon is shining just for you.

In the rain, a swim is lit by diamonds that shine on the sea every time a rain drop meets it. Back to fairyland. Unforgettable.

The salt air is a tonic, Pat Ryan, an old family friend told me once when I was visiting her in Petit Forte. And I remember this and know it is true. Those days on Placentia Bay, long dirt roads and white clapboard standing tall on little hills. Fried fish and rashers, and visitors sitting in chairs by the door under the yellow light of the kitchen.

The sea is sometimes blue and sometimes brown or grey or green. Every shade has a different story to tell. Each one meaningful, a different day, a different place, somehow all connected. Sea stories.

I am grateful to know it, to feel it, to have grown up next to it.

Photo by: Valerie Mansour / 2023

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