A dispatch: from the drift of my thoughts in summer

Sea creatures, tide pools, and life at the edgelands of change 🐚

A chairde,

Last month, I sent you a letter from midsummer, and mid-everything else.

This month, it’s a dispatch from the drift; my thoughts fragmented in the heat, like bladderwrack taken apart by the tide.

Red Rocks at sunset

Summer is dreamy for me. I’m more of a transitional-season person by nature. I like that time when things are just becoming. The thing itself - here, present, complete - is never quite as fun for me.

I like early September when the breeze takes on that cooler quality, and autumn can begin to be felt. I prefer the soulful anticipation of Christmas Eve to the joy-out-loud of Christmas Day. Everyone hates January - I love its peacefulness.

I am a person in transition, happiest among the borderlands of what has been, and what is coming in.

The hot heat and bright lights of summer can be too noisy, too exposing for me.

I prefer summer mornings with their cool promise, and the dreaminess of the evening.

The Edgelands of Change 🧭

The school summer break starts in two weeks. I have a new job, in a different timezone. Each day brings different work, with different people, in a different part of the world. My husband and I can plan no more than one week ahead. The dog will get walked, everyone will get fed and the interminable housework will get done somehow, but that is the limit of our drowsy summer-addled brains.

The dog is in heat, her first, just as perimenopause begins to make itself known in my own body, through joint aches and fragmented thoughts.

There we are, just two girls at opposing ends of the sliding scale of our womanhood; each as bewildered as the other. I stroke her velvet ears, and run my hand over her soft snout, warm against my knee. She watches me with care, her amber eyes focused on my every move.

I am dropping things in the kitchen, I am radiating heat and irritability, I cannot cope when more than two noises occur within ten feet of where I am standing.

I am writing it all down in the creamy pages of my journal, while she watches; the dappled sunlight of summer chasing my pen as it moves, illuminating a new journey into the edgelands of change for us both.

The Ballad of Big Jimmy 🦀

Yesterday was overcast but warm, here on the north west coast of the Wirral Peninsula where we live. The boys wanted to comb the tide pools of nearby Red Rocks beach after lunch, so into the car we went, equipped with nets, buckets, a perspex box for the purposes of observation, and a flask of hot chocolate with marshmallows.

I did not remember the smaller net with the short handle or the binoculars, or the pocket notebook I use for notes on the go, or my own sandals for walking through water.

The tide was out, far out in fact. There was a strong breeze, which covered us in fine sand, making us splutter as we walked. The Red Rocks themselves are sandstone, said to be over 200 million years old, the colour of oxidised blood. A stony outcrop lies just beyond the beach itself, known to the locals as Bird Island, on account of its being a feeding ground for waders at high water. We walked across the rippled sand to reach it.

Usually the sand is damp and waterlogged but the day’s high heat and sun had rendered it dry and firm. The red stone of the rocks glittered underneath our feet.

It was the first time this year I walked barefoot on the sand.

Minuscule crabs and tiny shrimp darted under our tread. The water was stratified, cold on one step and warmer on the next, the unseen terrain of the surface below suddenly shifting our footing. A patch of quicksand lurked at the edge of one large pool, quivering like an underbaked dessert. It sucked our feet in and I quickly ushered the boys away from its grasp.

A deep pool overhung by a rocky shelf was the most fruitful for our efforts to catch and observe sea creatures. We spotted a huge crab, a bounty compared to the tiddlers scuttling about, but try as we might, we could not catch him. He was tucked tightly into the rock’s crevices. I had also forgotten to bring any bait, so we loitered at the pool’s edge, hoping he might slide out. After a few minutes, I knelt down on the damp sand to peer in underneath the rock, and found myself looking straight into his shrewd little eyes. I knew right then that we would not catch him; his spirit was bright and clever, and we were on his home turf.

We gave up the big crab, and climbed up onto the rock to drink our hot chocolate and marshmallows in the warm, sandy breeze. Grains of sand crunched between my teeth as I drank, which was not unpleasant. I looked out to the horizon, and the white frothy rollers of the distant water. The high tide here is deceptive; it does not approach as you might imagine, like a straight line of moving water, more like a curve, pouring first into the channel between Hoylake Beach and Hilbre Island at the mouth of the River Dee, then rolling gradually out across the wide sand bars, and finally towards Red Rocks.

The blue haze of the mountainous outlines of the Welsh coast set against the green and blue of the Irish Sea aroused in me an intense feeling of homecoming, and of the summerscapes I remember from my life in Ireland.

It was so real I was momentarily disorientated, almost dizzy.

*

The perspex box was by now filled with my eldest son’s treasures: tiny crabs floating more than scuttling, shrimp and other various translucent invertebrates of some kind, along with some seaweed fronds for flair.

In our final five minutes, he took hold of a large loose piece of rock, barely noticeable above the surface of the pool, and carefully turned it over, searching for anything bigger than a fingernail when suddenly, a large crab slid off the underside of the rock into the water.

The three of us sprang into action, and quickly lowered the net over him as he tried to disappear. My eldest boy dropped him into the box amid our triumphant shouts, and there he was: ‘Big Jimmy,’ they called him.

Big Jimmy circumnavigated the box, his pincers up and ready for action. He was agitated, and utterly conscious of his confinement. After watching him for a few moments, I noted the tide was getting closer and the wind was getting stronger. It was time to go, and to grant Big Jimmy his freedom.

In truth, I was a little afraid of him.

I held the edges of the box and poured the contents as carefully as I could back into the pool, the creatures and the wet sand splashing out, and last of all, there went the might of Big Jimmy. As he rolled furiously out of the box on his back, we noticed a smaller crab entangled in his murderous claws, before they both disappeared into the world beneath the water, and so it was a good afternoon’s work for us, and for Big Jimmy too.

We packed up our kit, and walked, skipped and ran back to the safety of the shore, across the sand, powdery and warm in some places, and firmly ridged in others.

The fact that I left the flask behind did not dampen our spirits.

We were sandy, salted and happily tired out, in reprieve from those distant borderlands, if only for an afternoon.

Thanks for Reading 🙏

And thank you for your friendship. Please consider sharing this newsletter with at least one other person - I’d love to add more friends into our community.

Le grá, ❤️

Do chara (your friend),

Ciara x