sea and sun

Now Playing: The Postal Service, "Such Great Heights". (Courtesy Philip. Seems appropriate, somehow. Whenever I listen to this song, and to Nick Drake's "River Man", I listen to them over and over again....)

First things first: another poem up on Through A Glass Darkly, at last. Keep in mind, when reading it, the transience of human life.

This morning I woke up in the McCollums' house to the sounds of Erin, Eleanor, Nathanael, and Reuben getting ready to go to school. Familiar household sounds--pots and pans clattering, doors banging, feet hurrying up and down the stairs, voices shouting and replying. Emmaline's alarm went off beside me, and she turned it off but stayed half-asleep until I elbowed her (as requested the night before), and she woke up with a chuckle. While she took a shower, I dressed, then went downstairs. Mrs. M was just going out to drop the girls off at school. I had a bowl of cereal, sitting alone in the empty kitchen. Outside the day was still dark and cloudy, as though morning had forgotten to come, or was running late as well. I meandered around the house, standing by windows in hallways, watching dawn come slowly in the east beyond the sycamore trees. Steel grey-blue clouds moving away southeastward, leaving behind a periwinkle sky.

I loitered in the kitchen while Emmaline grabbed her breakfast and discussed plans with Mr. M, who was eating his breakfast after the morning milking. Emmaline left at nine-thirty or so, to spend the day with Alistair: he was given a flight lesson for his birthday, so he'd invited her to come along for the half-hour flight, and then to spend the day. After she left, I chatted with Mr. and Mrs. M some, then moseyed upstairs to sit on Emmaline's bed and study Philippians 2. Philippians is proving to be a difficult book to profit from, more so than Ephesians, which had immediate relevance when I first began to study it. I know that I need the messages of Philippians about Christ's love on my behalf and how I ought to reflect Him in my treatment of others; also, the messages about peace in Christ concerning prayer and contentment, which I desperately need during this season of life as I move constantly from place to place. Nonetheless, I find this epistle more disconnected than Ephesians, which in some ways makes it harder to "get into". (Nickel Creek, "Nickel Creek", Track 1, "Ode to a Butterfly" now--perfectly blissful music.)

Anyhow, at about ten-thirty, I pulled on my sturdy trainers, my pashmina and gloves, and coat, and set off alone to walk down to Portsteward Strand, as the main beach nearby is called. A good three-mile walk, at least. The house was quiet and empty as I left it, sitting behind me in the sunshine. The sun was thinly veiled by clouds, and the morning still had a wintry chill to it, though the cold was more bracing than unbearable. I walked down Islandtasserty Road, over the bridge where the road leaps above the railroad line that runs between Londonderry and Belfast. I crossed the Coleraine Road, and went up the Agherton Road. A couple of houses at the start of the road, where big dogs barked irritably at me, but after that, the familiar network of small fields, punctuated only here and there by houses. British robins twittered at me from hawthorn hedgerows; crows pecked at the rich brown furrows of a ploughed field; a tortoiseshell cat eyed me yellowly from under a fence. The grass at the edge of the road was wet, and the black road gleamed blue, slick with water.

I went up the Agherton Road as far as I could, to the roundabout by the graveyards, where a new cemetery lies on the right and an old cemetery with the ruins of a chapel in it on the left, and continued on, up toward Portstewart. Houses now, on either side. New developments--tall white houses, reminding me of the ones in Boulder, Colorado. Behind me on the road I heard the clop of horses' hooves and , glancing over my shoulder, saw a pair of riders coming up behind me. The road fell by degrees toward the town, in two long slopes. More and more houses, smaller semi-detached houses, older ones, closer to the town. Another roundabout, and then down into Portstewart itself, along the Promenade. Past The Anchor pub, and turning off finally by the Catholic priory, where St. Mary's Star of the Sea church faces out over Portstewart harbor, and the priory itself sits on the cliff above, like a white battlemented ship.

I took the cliff walk, running along the cliffs under the priory, and at last to the Strand. Emmaline, Erin, and I had walked along here the last Sabbath I visited them, in the afternoon. That day it was cloudy and the waves were enormous, crashing against the shore with plumes of spume. Today it was sunny, the sun coming out by degrees until the air was quite mild, and the waves were blue-and-white. The path snaked along the cliff, sometimes going up and down slick uneven flights of steps. Grass grew in mats on the cliffs. Below, the waves broke on black outcrops of rock where seagulls and other small seabirds stood on the lees of the rocks.

At one point, I scrambled off the path onto one of the little shelf beaches that come cupped in the cliffs as they fall lower to the sea, toward the Strand. The tide was running high, so I had to dodge the waves that came slithering in as I walked along the little beach. Delight settled on me as I sifted through the beds of shells washed up among the rocks. Great heaps of shells, piled and stirred together, many of them no more than tiny broken fragments, making a sort of dark coarse sand. Here the shells are conical, like barnacle shells, and striped--orange, grey, black, white, and grey-blue. Sometimes there are the twisted snail shells, but most of the shells are these zebra ones. Among them I found pieces of sea glass, green and pale blue and white, scooped and scoured by the waves. Soon I had a handful, and had to climb back onto the path with a pocket that clinked slightly as I walked.

I climbed down to the beach on the flight of stairs, and walked along the beach a little way. Erin and I had walked almost all the way down the beach that Sabbath afternoon, so I didn't feel the need, with the hour-and-a-half walk back to the farm lying before me, to go very far. The firm brown sand shimmered where the waves had made it wet. The waves surging, cresting, and falling, stroke after stroke, the endless sound. The sun shone down on the water and turned it a vivid, living teal, and glanced on the white walls and dark roofs of the Portstewart Promenade, crusting the eastern arm of the bay. To the west, the strand curved away up to the point where Mussendun Temple stands. Beyond that, flecked gold and green in the sunshine, was another headland, and beyond that, more cliffs--Donegall, western Ireland.

Walking back along the cliff walk, I stopped on a bench in the sunshine to rest before marching back to the farm, my back to the warm stone wall, holding back the cliff on which the priory stands. Moving on, somewhat restored, I climbed up through the town again. Voices of people around me: a mother coaxing her toddler up the street; two women greeting each other at the door of a drug store. Not many people out. At the roundabout where the old graveyard is, I took a short detour, scrambled up some grassy steps, and went into the old graveyard. I walked around the ruins of the chapel a bit--not much to see, just wet grassy mounds, thin stone slabs aslant, an old yew tree, a lanky rosebush with one pale waxy bud coming into bloom in the shelter of the stone walls.

It was good to be back on the Agherton Road, out in the country again. Alone under the blue sky. Silence--no wind, and hardly a whisper from the busy Coleraine Road.

The farmyard was as quiet as I'd left it. Young heifers eyed me out the "window" of their winter barn, white eyes rolling in black faces. I went into the house. Mr. and Mrs. M were just sitting down to lunch and welcomed me cordially. We had a thick soup with carrots, barley, lentils, tomatoes, and celery. Mr. and Mrs. M told me a funny story about how Mr. M had gotten lost on a walk in County Armagh while he was attending synod there. After lunch, we sat around the kitchen table, drinking tea out of thick white mugs. Mrs. M was in the midst of trying to put together the church's financial reports for the congregational meeting in a couple of weeks, and detritus of papers, slips, and charts layered the table. Mr. M read classified ads out of an American dairy farming magazine, asking me jokingly if I would like to manage a cheese farm in California for him.

Mrs. M needed some desserts baked for her WMA meeting tonight, so I offered to do it. She got me started in the kitchen. At first I worked on making coffee walnut chocolate cookies (!), but once I'd gotten all the mix into the bowl, the blender refused to do the job--and I remembered that I'd promised to talk with my mother on Skype at three o'clock. Mrs. M took over for me, and I, very apologetic, disappeared upstairs to sit on Emmaline's bed with my laptop. Outside, clouds were coming over again, from the east this time. I heard doors slam downstairs--the others were back from school. I said good-bye to my mother at four o'clock or so, and went downstairs to see what I could do.

Mrs. M had baked scones in the hour since I'd been in the kitchen, and they were still warm. She, Eleanor, and I sat around the kitchen table, eating the warm scones with hazelnut honey Emmaline had bought at the Christmas market in Paris. Eleanor hung around while I made the malteser bars (the cookies were in the oven). She helped mostly by licking the spoon.

When the bars were made, the cookies were ready to come out of the oven, so Mrs. M and I pulled them out and slid them onto cooling racks, where they were sprinkled with powdered sugar. The counter was positively snowy by the time Eleanor and I were done with it. I washed up the dishes I'd used, and crept away to fetch my laptop. Eleanor and Nathanael settled down at the kitchen table to do homework while watching the new Yours, Mine, Ours on the computer in the kitchen. I curled up in the little sitting room by the fire. I'm on one of the leather sofas; Reuben is on the other, playing his PSP, a handheld gaming device. I can hear the clashing and clicking of the "Star Wars" game he's playing, but I've got my Skype headset in so that I can listen to "Nickel Creek", too. The fire crackles and clinks on the hearth--almost the same sound as the sea makes, tumbling shells in the backwash of its waves.