Yesterday I sat out here all day as the sun took its afternoon stroll across the sky. The dampness from the ground soaked through my blue jeans, but I didn’t care. As long as I was hidden carefully out of sight nothing else mattered. The cornstalks are taller than me now. Green and straight they sway gently in the wind to acknowledge my father’s calling. Their height makes this a perfect place to hide. Today I’m not hiding though. Today I am simply listening.
When I was seven, Uncle Jim came to visit us from a place called Ocean City. I imaged an entire town on the ocean. Each building and house floating in a kind of giant boat firmly anchored.
My Uncle Jim from Ocean City smelled like cigars and caramels. When he laughed it seemed to erupt from some place deep inside the plaid covered belly that spilled out over his rodeo belt buckle.
When I was seven he came to visit Dad and me amidst tears and confusion. At that time he gave me a special present.
“Georgia, this is for you,” he said as he pulled the white and gray spiraled shell from the crumbled paper bag he was carrying. The shell’s inside was delicate and pink like a wound. When I reached out to take it, it was heavier that I expected. “Hold it up to your ear. You can hear the ocean.”
Lifting the shell’s cold wound to my ear I felt anxious and frightened half expecting a giant claw to reach out a pinch me. Nothing did. Instead of the pain I expected, I heard vast space and endless time; like everything that ever happened or ever will happen rolling over and over each other.
When the wind blows like this it reminds me of that day. I like to close my eyes and listen. I like to imagine that I’m at the ocean. I can’t even begin to imagine what the ocean would look like. The bigness of it seems impossible, but one day I plan to see it and feel its waves licking my ankles. I think that it must be like the sky turned upside down.
There must be an ocean in Heaven where the angels wear swimsuits instead of wings. When we die we go to the shore to lie beneath a forever-blue sky and ride the rolling waves. I imagine my mother there, lying on a pink beach towel with her eyes closed. I remember the way she was when I was small, before my father’s throat became thick with anger. She was whole and youthful.
I am stuck in time, waiting for a glimpse of her coal colored eyes. Eyes I can no longer see. I listen to the wind imitating waves and know that I am hearing what she is hearing.
Photo by Johan J.Ingles-Le Nobel