The amniotic sea

Dear Nancy:

I got your last letter while I was still at the ocean, that land of light and distance. We saw dolphins and egrets and newborn ponies and each day I walked to the far end of the beach, where there was no one. There was a kind of shrine there–a large piece of driftwood decorated with shells, sea-faded cans, a left-behind fishing reel, cast-off tires at its feet.

I didn’t see the ocean until I was eighteen years old.

My mother, back in eastern Kentucky, has never seen it all and nor has my Aunt Ruth. In my childhood a drive to the ocean was the impossibility of hours and miles. Vacations, even, were rare. In my immediate family, my parents seemed to want to get away from each other as much as possible, rather than take trips that involved time spent. Once my father took a trip to Florida to go deep sea fishing with his friend Mr. Chapman, while my mother and I stayed at a trailer park where her parents were living, then, outside of South Bend, Indiana, where my grandfather worked for an auto plant. We went to a Dog and Suds for root beer floats.

The ocean has since been the land of the imagination for me, land of wishing. Some years ago, I went for the summer to St. George Island, outside of Panama City. I worked on a fishing boat. Made friends with a truck driver named Wild Martina who took me skeet shooting and out on a boat where I caught an eel and saw gators by the dozen. I also worked on a novel with a grant I’d gotten. I think of those days as clean and vast, some bravery I’ve forgotten and want back. To go to the sea, alone and a stranger seeking solace and words.

I am not sure what I seek at the ocean these days. I have been adrift these last few years. In a job that left me at odds with what I believe, how I want to lead my life. Do any of us have that? Work that satisfies, completes, agrees with our principles? As I walked beside the ocean this week, I imagined myself casting off my life, before. Breathing in, out, exhaling the woman I no longer want to be. I want, as you say, “to use my gift of imagination for good rather than evil.”

While I was at the ocean, I read a novel I loved. It was based on a Russian fairytale about a childless couple, an old woman and old man. They build a snow girl who comes alive in the night and finally gives them the family they have wanted, though not in the way they imagined. I read the novel in two deep drinks of afternoons as I sat and stared out at the sea.

Back at the job I left, there were so many rules about stories. No science fiction. No romance. No adventure, no thrillers or espionage, and probably no fairy tales. The rules made me tired, often. They made me thirsty and sad. Who is to say what the story is that is being born, the story stirring in the amniotic sea of the imagination? “Nothing,” you say, “can take that sweetness away from me.”

That was my gift this week at the ocean. To glimpse, even for awhile, the power of words coming back to me.

And your gift? Look for it in the mail, this week. It is a little box of sea-things. Make up a story about them?

Much Love, Karen