Red Sky at Night, Sailors Delight
Sunrises at the end of summer are often spectacular displays of color, and last week, on the day it rained for ten hours, the sky suggested the weather rhyme “red sky in morning, sailors take warning.”
When I was a girl growing up in Massachusetts, I fancied myself a woman of the ocean, even though we lived inland and didn’t own a boat. We spent part of many summers at the beach in Dennis on the Cape, and I would stare out at the horizon from the water’s edge, my feet tucked tingling into the sand while the waves lapped at the shore, eroding it out from under me with its rhythmic beat.
Some days the wind came right off the water, a slanting salt spray that straightened my wet hair and turned the kinky curls into thick strands of straw. I leaned into the wind and imagined myself sailing out towards a strange, new land somewhere far across the ocean, navigating by the stars. I knew the Big Dipper, the Little Dipper, Orion, the North Star. I could learn more. I could go places, maybe.
Of course, it always ended with the bunch of us packed into the Vega, our salt-coated skin sticking to the hot vinyl seats, we kids trying not to touch each other in the back unless to deliver a punch or a pinch. I remember feeling like I wanted to cry on those long rides back through the Cape to our town, the wind blasting in through the open car window, hot and frantic, my father’s cigarette smoke rushing around my head and the ash pelting me when he took a corner, the wind whipping my stiff hair into my eyes so that I had to keep them closed. I didn’t want to close them, I wanted to watch my favorite place in retreat.
For years I watched the sunset and sunrise and predicted what the coming day would be like for the brave sailors of the world. Never out loud, of course, that would be crazy.
Now I just dream of spending some length of time (by myself, naturally) by the ocean. I don’t really care what ocean, although I am partial to the North Atlantic, and doubt I would enjoy the crowds of drunk, tan college students in Ft. Lauderdale (or wherever the big spring break scene is now). But I watch the sky for other reasons.
Now that bright red morning horizon speaks to the constant gardener dripping with fatigue from standing out all evening with the hose in hand, whispers the promise of rain. And when the evening sky sets in a blaze, especially after several days of rain and humidity, it heralds the hope of a bright, sunny day burning off all of the mold spores and drying off the leaves in the bean patch so I can get in there and pick before they’re all too tough to eat.
I’m a landlubber and a homebody after all.
"In summer we live out of doors, and have only impulses and feelings, which are all for action, and must wait commonly for the stillness and longer nights of autumn and winter before any thought will subside; we are sensible that behind the rustling leaves, and the stacks of grain, and the bare clusters of the grape, there is the field of a wholly new life, which no man has lived; that even this earth was made for more mysterious and nobler inhabitants than men and women. In the hues of October sunsets, we see the portals to other mansions than those which we occupy."
~Henry David Thoreau
September 19th, 2007 at 8:20 am
Lovely reminiscence…a little land, a little sea…perfect!
September 19th, 2007 at 9:15 am
What a lovely post. Who ever said that we can only have one home, my friend? You can be at home wherever you are. I’d join you on a road trip to the sea…
September 19th, 2007 at 11:15 am
Landlubber or no, it does a body good to spend time at the sea! I’ve been told that salt water absorbs negative energy, and even had one natural practitioner bring her own sea salt to mix with water and place near her patient to catch the bad juju. I’ve most definitely found this to be true. A bad day can be made much, much better by a simple float in the ocean and the week ahead is altered, too. [woo. there was a tangent]
Gorgeous pictures and what great memories.
September 20th, 2007 at 8:36 am
. . . well, ya know, you now have a friend who lives ten minutes from gorgeous nc ocean and sandy beaches . . . hmmmmmm, i smell a roadtrip in your future
September 20th, 2007 at 10:10 am
Oh, the blessed fall rains in the garden at the end of a dry season. Or the end of the fire season, out here. Such a relief. I agree with Debra, maybe your heart is at the shore and on dry land, both.
September 20th, 2007 at 10:58 am
Once again, I must say that you say things I felt and talk of mental places I’ve been. I feel like you are a kindred spirit. When I lived in San Francisco, in the Richmond district, I would walk to China beach every week-end and I would sit on the rocks and just listen, sometimes lying down and just closing my eyes and breathing that salty spray whether there were homeless people nearby or not. I would also stand in the water and let my feet get soft with the sand and salt which are like foot scrubbers. When I would go back to my little apartment I always felt I left something of myself at the ocean. Yet, I have to say that I’m quite fearful of being over the ocean. And of tsunamis.
Those pictures are beautiful.
September 20th, 2007 at 12:48 pm
The red in that first picture takes my breath away!
September 24th, 2007 at 4:23 pm
Thank you! After reading your lovely post I pulled out Maureen McGovern’s “Another Woman in Love” and sat back to enjoy listening to this:
I’m a happy woman
I made my choice in life
I chose to settle down
I chose to be a wife
And I take pleasure in my quiet hearth
And happy home
I never gave my heart
Its chance to roam
I could have been a sailor
And sailed the seven seas
The wind in my face all day
Can you taste the salty breeze?
I could have been a lover
Watchin’ waves before me part
But I settled for safer harbors
Of my heart
I’m a lucky woman
I’m the envy of my peers
Never ask for favors
And I never show my fears
Surrounded by too many friends
I am a one-man band
With all the trappings of
A life lived second-hand
I could have been a sailor
Rollin’ through the night
My sails before the wind
And the stars my only light
I could have been a dreamer
But dreams just fall apart
So, I settled for safer harbors
Of my heart
And I take pleasure in my quiet hearth
And happy home
I never gave my heart
A chance to roam
I could have been a sailor
And sailed the seven seas
The wind in my face all day
Can you taste the salty breeze?
I could have been a dreamer
But dreams just fall apart
So, I settled for safer harbors
Of my heart
I settled for safer harbors
Of my heart