When Your Backyard Is The Ocean
Little Mac stared out the kitchen window at the ice flowers where the cove had frozen and with the falling tide broken over the rocks. The ice did peel back from the rocks like blossoms. It was a bouquet of unearthly beauty right there in his backyard because the ocean was his backyard.
"Oh Bertie," he said, "how lucky we are, you and me."
"We'll be lucky if you don't peel your fingers again," said Big Bertha.
She herself kept her eyes on her work. It was one thing for Little Mac to nick himself and absent-mindedly bleed on the potatoes. It would be quite another for her to go astray with a customer's order. A lifetime of sewing had taken its toll on her eyes. She felt such fatigue there that she hated to do a thing over, even a single stitch.
"At the same time," said Little Mac, "that old saying makes more sense to me than ever."
"Oh, that one," said Big Bertha. "And which one would that be?"
"That beauty is in the eye of the beholder. Those poor ducks - here it is thirty below with the wind chill and them out there in it."
"There'll be blue in the water again, luvvy."
"You know, Bertie," said Little Mac, after a minute or two, "this new thinking cap you made me, sometimes I think it works too well. Lately the more I think about things, the more I go from glad to sad. Till I can't hardly stand it."
"Sure and it's only a tea cozy," Bertha thought but did not say. She was helped in this abstinence by the intrusion of her heart, which seemed to have slipped its moorings and risen like a balloon into her mouth. The water would be blue again. The water would be blue again. She kept that stubbornly in her mind, repeating it over and over. The water would surely, would surely be blue again.
28 December 2017
Texas Jim
Prospect, Nova Scotia (Photo from somewhere on 333 on the way to Peggy's Cove)
www.granitecoast.ca