Sea fever

she was no one special

she knew that

it was the polio that was the trickster that had taken many lives as long as man could think back and remember…they found it on Egyptian tablets so she knew all about it by this time…

she was still alive…

she was the lucky one…

that’s what they  said…

…she wasn’t born this cripple who had been confined these many months…that came after the pain in the head and the fever. She had stared through the window from her bed for so long that she lost count of time, even on the day she when she wakened as she drifted in and out of sleep.

She watched the clouds drift one day and race the next, she had watched the sky grow dark and the rain beating on her window the drops running down in little rivers and catching one another and when mama opened that window wide at last she knew it must be spring. And when mama opened the window after the slate in the sky turned to blue she knew that soon she would hear the sea, waves breaking on the rocks, rushing back with a hiss and clatter of pebbles as if in a giant drum. She could feel the pounding, relentless, till the tide went out. She would walk again one day was what mama told her, when she had saved for the splints to hold her legs…and until then she had a lot of cards to draw and fish to sell when Pa would do the rounds…25 cents a card is what she got, that’s all, there wasn’t much profit in it so she would have to wait a very long time….

‘I must go down to the seas again’ she remembered and she longed to run in the wind along the crescent beach where she had built sandcastles with her friends, found sand dollars and pretty rocks. She liked the white ones best and brought them home for edging in the garden… they had read the poem in class and she thought about the poet who longed to be by the sea again as she did, was he sick like her so he did not get to go?

‘to the lonely seas and the sky’….it was the moon to the half tonight, and she knew the ocean would dance with light…’and all I ask is a tall ship and a star to steer her by’…she could see Orion clearly from her window…  was the name of the ship North Star perhaps or Orion? How was it when he steered her, when he felt the kicking wheel? Wheel’s kick? However could it be? ‘and the wheel’s kick and the wind’s song’…she’d heard the song and knew how to sing it…’and the white sails shaking’ …’and a grey mist on the sea’s face, and a grey dawn breaking’….she imagined the white of the sails against the grey and on those days she would hear the fog horn bellow, three short, one long and then a pause for three, bellow endlessly on and the sound was buffered by the wind and the fog…over the back harbour she heard the sound drift as from afar and she watched the pale golden shadow of the moon setting like a ghost through the shrouds…

she would go down to the sea again…one day…

…he must go down to the seas again….longing, like her… ‘for the call of the running tide is a wild call and a clear call’….she heard it and she knew it and she called it from the depth of her soul…‘’that may not be denied; and all he asked was a windy day’…yes! And run along the beach…’with the white clouds flying’…it’s all that she asked too…’and the flung spray in her hair and the brown spume ‘neath bare feet, and the sea-gulls flying’…she heard their cries when they went off at first light and returned at dusk to their roosts, she heard them when the cutters came in, Victor’s Theresa, number 145 and the Mary Ellen, 233,  when they unloaded the catch at the dock, cod and Pollock, sometimes a lobster would get caught in the net and he’d bring it home for her as a treat…Pa would pack the fish in boxes and ice and got them ready to sell on the truck, Mama by his side packing up the fish in brown paper while she chatted to the ladies and passed on the news, offering her cards for Easter or for Christmas or for Mothers’ Day at the same

time… callipers they called those splints, tough metal frames they screwed around your legs to hold them in and straight and she would have callipers one day, was what mama said, and she would walk through the spume, run even, with the wind pulling her hair,  smelling the salt in the air….

…’he longs to go down to the seas again, to the vagrant gypsy life’…while she lay here in her bed with hot blankets wrapped around her legs and mama massaging the tendons hard with baby oil to stretch them…did he know what pain that was ?  That was pain! Every day that was pain! Each and every day…and it made her tired, without hope as well…and all he did was long? Could he imagine any of it? Hey?  It’s only a poem! But yes, she too wanted to ‘see the gull’s way and the whales way,’ they passed along the coast here. Gentle beasts the colour of the his sails and made their way towards the St Lawrence and then swam north far beyond her imagination…’where the wind’s like a whetted knife; and all he asked was a merry yarn from a laughing fellow rover’,…my, what a nerve, really, laughing fellow rover…so he wasn’t sick, she knew that now…laughing fellow rover indeed…no one stopped by much any more to see her and to tell her laughing yarns…’and a quiet sleep and a sweet dream when the long trick’s over’…

…she longed for this trick to be over to be gone, ‘cause all that she could do was sleep and dream and sink into her world of dreams and fantasy and longing…

…she listened to the ocean pounding, she heard the crashing waves, she saw the ship he longed to see, she’d help him steer, he’d be glad of it at least, she knew, she reached out to him across the sea and through the mist and  then she climbed on board…she had left her pain behind her now, her anger had gone from her heart, she felt almost dizzy, light, as if she was floating…

…she heard the sea gulls crying, she heard the wind’s song and the moon aglow through the mist…

they said that she was lucky…and she was…

they said that she was brave…she heard what they said…

on the song of the wind she heard someone say…

that

she 

was 

special

.