In England, when we can gather blackberries we really know it is autumn. I do a cliff walk amongst the bushes with the sea glittering beneath me and gather pots and pots of blackberries to make jams and jellies to store on my pantry shelves ready to be opened as winter draws in.
This year in the South of England we are having a warm dry start to the autumn so I am still swimming . I brought a picnic lunch and after a wonderful swim when all the feelings of tension floated away with the ebbing tide, I sat on the concrete steps up to the promenade where I could see and hear nothing but the crashing waves and ate my solitary picnic with joy in my heart. It was wonderful to be alone with this moving beautiful translucent body of water that is forever restless and able to give me absolute peace in the way nothing else can.
My love affair with the sea began as a little kid who lived in the suburbs of a rather grim street of council houses in a grey Midland city which was "sodden and unkind" as the line in the poem "The South Country" goes. It started after having once in my first five years of life being taken to what I would now see as a rather taudry Lincolnshire seaside town for a week in a boarding house. It was one of those grim places that somehow leaves the taste of Stork margarine in your mouth. You had to book to be allowed to run a bath (showers did not exist) and you were not allowed to be in the boarding house between 10.00 am and 5.00pm. However my world was focused on this glittering body of water that seemed to stretch on forever in which you were allowed to splash about and play all day on the giant playground of a grey/ yellow sandy beach. It was tantalising for a council house kid whose playground was the rainy grey streets. There the treasure of the streets were sucker sticks to collect for making models or pop bottle you could get 6d back on it you took them to the shop. But here the hidden treasures were pink and white seashells in beautiful curving shapes, which had had sea creatures living in them, and in which you could hear the roar of the ocean if you held them to your ear.
As a child I would dream if the sea, I wanted so much to be there. In my dreams I would find the blue waves breaking at the bottom of my road and hear the cry of the gulls float away on the wind.
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Kkimm
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Wow. Beautiful photos and fabulous prose! What a good writer and photographer you are.
I grew up a couple of blocks from the Atlantic Ocean. Loved body surfing and generalized flapping about in the water. As a teenager, I had my picture in the local newspaper for swimming in early May (very cold water at that time of year). But I was a fish and couldn’t wait for season to begin.
We used to pick beach plums to make jelly. What a wonderful taste!
We live on the West Coast of Florida now, and even though the Gulf of Mexico has its perks and beauty, I miss the Atlantic Ocean. But it’s only 4 or 5 hours away, if I need “a fix.”
Thanks again for your post. It’s wonderful to see beauty again after a breakdown. Lynne
Thanks for your lovely reply, it means so much to me. You did great to swim so early and get your picture in the paper. Florida is beautiful but nice you can still get your fix of the Atlantic, such a magnificent ocean.
What are beach plums? Sound really interesting, do you get blackberries as we do in England?
Yes we have blackberry, blueberry, and raspberry bushes. Quince, too (and more). I love our pineapple, grapefruit, oranges, limes, lemons, avocado, mango, papaya, prickly pear, etc in Florida. I think it the coolest thing to pick your own fruits/berries off bushes or trees.
... the beach plum, is a species of plum native to the East Coast of the United States, from Maine south to Maryland.
Thank you for sharing your beautiful pictures and memories. We forget, I think, that you are an island nation . The sea must be in your blood. It creates a time continuum connecting us to the past , and it is a wonderful metaphor for the changes life brings. Again thank you for a pleasant morning which went in an unexpected direction. Pam.
Thanks so much for your interesting reply. Thought provoking too, yes I think both my partner and I feel very connected to the sea, different childhoods and different ways of being drawn to the sea, but definitely there.
"The Lure if the sea" by Beautiful South would be appropriate here but I don't know how to post music clips.
I have aspirations to write, have my first novel about 1 third finished. Do not write poems but did in my youth, they all got lost after I left home, they were not very good but we're honest and dealt with some of the issues of my somewhat antisocial and self distractive youth spent in my sodden and unkind Midland town (happens to be DH Lawrence's town by the way) Prose or novels seem to be my medium however.
I tried to have a look at your poems the other day and the link did not seem to work for me.
Your writing is so vivid, I can see how well it would lend itself to a novel. Wonderful to hear that your first book is underway. I don't suppose you'd be willing to disclose any details about it? It's exciting to have a novelist here in our midst!
Almost the reverse of your trajectory as a writer, I wrote some fiction in my youth, but exclusively poetry now, though poetry has been my first and will be my last love.
I am sorry to hear that your early poems were lost. I know that if I lost any of my early drafts, I would be inconsolable.
Oh, I'm sorry about the broken links on the Wordpress page. Some time ago, I botched the uploads of the poems listed there (I was new to publishing anything online), then I decided I would just wait until I finish my first chapbook of poems to self-publish them online. I'm hoping the chapbook will be out sometime this winter and will be available free to download.
Please let us know here on HealthUnlocked when your book is out, as I'm sure you'll have many prospective readers!
Thanks John, I will have a think about what you have said and will look forward to reading your poems when they are out. Please remind me when they are available if that is OK. I really admire people who can write poetry, I do not feel I have the discipline for that.
I think my lack of feeling at loosing my poetry written as a young adult possibly reflects how I felt about myself at that time. I will think about it a bit more and ponder on whether I could reconstruct some of them.
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