Dear friend, you were right: the smell of fish and foam and algae makes one green smell together. It clears my head. It empties me enough to fit down in my own skin for a while, singleminded as a surfer. The first day here, there was nobody, from one distance to the other. Rain rose from the waves like steam, dark lifted off the dark. All I could think of were hymns, all I knew the words to: the oldest motions tuning up in me. There was a horseshoe crab shell, a translucent egg sack, a log of a tired jetty, and another, and another. I walked miles, holding my suffering deeply and courteously, as if I were holding a package for somebody else who would come back like sunlight. In the morning, the boardwalk opened wide and white with sun, gulls on one leg in the slicks. Cold waves, cold air, and people out in heavy coats, arm in arm along the sheen of waves. A single boy in shorts rode his skimboard out thigh-high, making intricate moves across the March ice-water. I thought he must be painfully cold, but, I hear you say, he had all the world emptied, to practice his smooth stand.
From Do Not Peel the Birches by Fleda Brown. Copyright © 1993 by Fleda Brown. Reprinted with permission of the author and Purdue University Press. All rights reserved.