The red bricks that formed the base of her cottage were
painted white. An old kind of white paint mixed and rolled on the bricks before
paints had so many names and stores competed with the artist’s palette. Milky white, white before the crystal shines
through it; off white, egg shell, satin white, oyster. Every expression of
color a competition unless you think the white of fresh mozzarella, taken from
the brine and how it tickles your tongue, that was the white bricks for her.
She saw them. She felt them.. Any clam shell she had ever seen was white like a
clam shell; not like milk. Every broken wave’s white, when the sun was at three
or four o’clock and set to focus on the breakers like a spotlight, was that
white. No other. Rolling white and roaring white, as the blue green wave rolled
through.
It is not the water that moves but the energy through it. Every wave is an illusion of movement; as if
the water is moving from one area to another. The Indian Ocean eventually
coming to the Jersey shore and every wetland on the coast holding something of
the Mediterranean and the Aegean within. The Pacific, one Jupiter-sized ocean,
carrying every river and Lake Baikal from Russia, even water off the deep
sturgeon and all of it rolling into every otter’s paws like a cabbage of
energy, that is really, layers and layers of energy and detritus of many oceans
and currents, rolling into their paws or filtered through the feathery gills of
baby clams. Every leaf a part of the
wrack line and watermark from the Yangtze, the Yellow or the Seine rivers. Why not bring Paris into it? After all, those
kicks of the Follies surely moved the air and birds’ preening feathers loose
caught this wind and moved onto the Seine and into the ocean and through the
currents, rolling, rolling to the Jersey shore. Why not? Or the Danube, blue
dancing on the edges of the red cabbage. Well, where else would that blue come
from except the Danube? Dancing on the
red cabbage like the white moths touched by yellow but owned by the air and
moving through space, time and energy to your garden. Wave and crest, colonies of Monarchs, moving
through time’s patterns since their own generation did not make the crossing
but left it to cascades of sparrows to wing through the air, stir up the cosmos
and move the whole pilgrimage along the curve of energy, the ladle of
abbondanza, the plenty crowding out of the great Horn and all of it, ending in the
colors of the evening, the deeper blues before the dark, the warmer reds, the
sweet colors of skin with summer on their nets and the lunar curve of
children’s calves and thighs walking through the sand; small sprays of grains
whisking past their toes, as one or maybe more look back for the dolphins,
always ready to come to the surface when you’re not looking; always there the
day before when you should have been.
The summer feeling like always.
