Sun and sea

I wrote this in a post the other day:

Today I dreamed that I was in a seaside village not unlike the one that I grew up in. (In my childhood village, the sea was always present even if you were not at the beach. You constantly caught glimpses of it glinting through trees or between houses.) My dream was like that. The sky was vast and clear, the sea sparkled in the sunshine and kids played and ran and laughed on the beach.

I think that dream may have been triggered by a Google search that I did about a month ago. One of the houses in which my family lived in that village was at the top of a hill down which a road ran to the ocean. There were houses on each side of the road so you could only sea a small portion of the sea. First thing every morning, I would open the curtain on my bedroom window and look at the ocean. I could tell with one glimpse whether it was good for body-surfing or surf-fishing.

If it was bright and sunny and the wind was blowing in the right direction, it was good for surfing. If it was gray and overcast, it was good for fishing. Also local lore had it that it was not good to surf when it was overcast because that's when sharks attacked. Of course they seemed to attack at any time. There were two deaths and four mutilations by sharks before 1959 (that's when I left for boarding school at the age of 11) when shark nets were eventually put in place.

But I ramble. I had a paint-by-numbers picture of a view down a steep road to the ocean with a small sailing boat bobbing on the waves. I loved that painting. It was mostly bright primary colors: brilliant blue sky, blue ocean with white-horse on the waves which showed that it was windy and the boat's beautiful red and yellow sail was fully filled out. Last month I remembered that painting and wondered if I could find something similar on the Web. I found some that had similar views but the colors were dull and they did not make me smile the way that painting used to.

When I wrote that previous post, I also Googled to see if I could find a picture of kids playing on the beach and again I was disappointed. Nothing seemed luminous enough for me. I definitely associate childhood with lots of light. Not only do the eyes dim with time but so does the mind. As we leave childhood behind the mind becomes overcast with worries, desires, plans. The light is still there but its sometimes obscured by the clouds of too much thinking.

Nothing in nature is exactly like that light but the thing that comes closest to it for me is the sun sparkling on the sea. It was dull and overcast here today so I couldn't go down to the beach and take the sort of pictures that I wanted but I found some pictures on the Web that I liked. The first one is Robert Littleford's Sun, Sea and Sandcastles.