I am not homesick. Really. Seriously, I mean it… hey stop doing that thing with your eyebrows, it makes you look like Joan Crawford. I just want to see water. And if you knew me better, you would know that I just said something that does not compute.
I don’t like sand. Never have, never will. It gets into places it has no right to be.
I don’t like blazing sun. Or sunburn.
I don’t like the combination of sand & sunscreen.
I don’t like the looooooooooong, hooooooooooot walk from the car to the beach, over the dunes… where the sand is too soft to wear shoes, but is hot enough to grill the soles of your feet to a nice Medium Rare.
I don’t like it when the wind picks up on the beach and your legs are attacked by a million tiny little fencing swords of sand.
I don’t like the crunch of sand between the lettuce of my sandwich. Or the grittiness between my teeth from a swallow of warm, flat mineral water.
I don’t like the walk back to the car, where everything is filled with sand, every crevice, every nook and cranny. Each grain delighted at the idea that it can now take a ride in my car, where it will stay for months until someone (that would be me) managed to spend 3 hours with a vacuum cleaner.
And of course, there is the car. Having sat in the blazing sun for several hours, it is now at roasting temperature. The steering wheel is so hot that you spend the next 20 minutes driving with your fingers dancing around, barely touching, and wishing the damn A/C would finally kick in.
When you grow up with the Pacific Ocean no further away than a 20 minute car ride, you learn to take it for granted in the same way that the people do that work in the Lindt Chocolate factory don’t want to eat chocolate anymore… well perhaps they do, but I can dream.
Recently I realised that I am landlocked. In fact I am not even sure how long it would take me to drive to see a huge expansive water, complete with pounding surf. I stare at this picture on the wall, every time I sit at the computer, and for all the things I dislike about the beach… walking at sunset is not among them.
I feel the need, the need for sea.
