I envy you your home by the sea. It was always my father's dream to settle by the sea. At 16 he joined the merchant marine and spent some years in the tropics, eventually ending up in Montreal where he met and married my mother. The closest he got to the sea after that was taking his young family down to the eastern seaboard of the United States for holidays. Some of my fondest memories are of standing in the breakers and floating in the salt sea off the coast of Maine, New Hampshire and Massachusetts, smelling the seaweed and watching the enormous gulls dive for fish, flying kites high over the dunes at sunset and feeling the fine sand sift through my toes.
I realized after I posted my comment that my father's experience of the sea wasn't limited to family vacations after he landed in Montreal. A few years later he was stationed in Halifax during the war and regularly flew in convoy patrols over the North Atlantic. Of course back then you hoped to stay out of the water.
I envy you your home by the sea. It was always my father's dream to settle by the sea. At 16 he joined the merchant marine and spent some years in the tropics, eventually ending up in Montreal where he met and married my mother. The closest he got to the sea after that was taking his young family down to the eastern seaboard of the United States for holidays. Some of my fondest memories are of standing in the breakers and floating in the salt sea off the coast of Maine, New Hampshire and Massachusetts, smelling the seaweed and watching the enormous gulls dive for fish, flying kites high over the dunes at sunset and feeling the fine sand sift through my toes.
ReplyDeleteI realized after I posted my comment that my father's experience of the sea wasn't limited to family vacations after he landed in Montreal. A few years later he was stationed in Halifax during the war and regularly flew in convoy patrols over the North Atlantic. Of course back then you hoped to stay out of the water.
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