Sea Legs

The First Substack Essay Drafted Entirely On A Flip Phone

"What seest thou else / In the dark backward and abysm of time?"

- Prospero in The Tempest, Act 1, Scene 2

When winter comes, the house settles into itself. Wooden floors warp and sigh in cooler air. Half of the doors fall back into joint. The other half fall out. The lock to my bedroom no longer works: aligned in the summertime, its two pieces have shifted an inch apart and can’t be forced together. The latch is broken year-round, so now nothing stops it from swinging open when someone slams the back door.

Last winter, we took in a friend’s cat for a few months. His name was Loki, but my housemates renamed him MK Ultra, after the illegal mind-control research program run by the CIA from 1953 to 1973. I don’t know. MK also stood for Mouse Killer.

Every night, he would paw open my unlocked door and jump onto my bed, then purr directly into my left ear for thirty minutes.

I dislike cats because I’m never sure when they plan to kill me, but I liked MK Ultra. Winter depression had bitten me hard that year. I had a gnawing loneliness that disappeared when MK was curled on my pillow.

He seemed to prefer the open road.

Once, while saying goodbye to a boy after a date, I left my front door open a second too long. We spent the next twenty minutes cursing and holding cat treats under parked cars. Unfortunately, things didn’t work out with the boy. Or the cat, who peed on my couch an unforgiveable number of times.

Enough. I gave them both up by the end of spring.

MK Ultra, neé Loki

Summer arrived, with its heavy afternoons and humid evenings spent drinking by the water. The house expanded. Yawned and rattled with the change of seasons. It’s a constant motion. The months are nanoseconds. The house is a schooner sailing on the slow waves of time.

I am still getting my sea legs. The ship rolls on a high ocean, sending me across the deck. Summer pitched to port, tipping me down our long hallway and out the back door. Everything always leans that way when the weather is warm. We spend all our time on the screen porch, ripping out the broken chains on our ceiling fans and reading in wicker chairs.

Avery reads on the screen porch.

Autumn came to cut the summer heat. Like a child with a fever breaking, the house sweated August from its ancient pores, tossing and turning with every Chesapeake thunderstorm. It awoke in cool October, sobered from summer’s delirium and choking leaves from its rusted gutters.

Winter brings another wave. The house exhales. The schooner groans to starboard, and we tumble across the decks again to the living room. We will spend dark evenings there with essays and books. It will be an endless season of folding blankets and putting throw pillows back on leather chairs. We will forget to turn the lamps off and see them in our windows from the street when the day grows dim in the afternoon.

First, there are hiccups. Warm bluebird days speckle the calendar. Eventually, the windy season prevails. 40-mile gusts, the heralds of winter, whip the water into whitecaps.

Avery and I were supposed to go sailing on Halloween, but the skipjack couldn’t take the wind. The day was brilliant. Breezes howled over the Chester River and churned it clear. We spent the evening under a tent watching a bluegrass band, plates of warm crab soup balanced on our knees.

A poem swings into my memory when the days grow shorter.

Oh western wind, when wilt thou blow
The small rain down can rain.
Christ, that my love were in my arms, and I in my bed again.
-Author Unknown

When the chill arrived, I fortified myself against winter depression. It won’t sweep me under like last year. I have my sea legs.

I don’t chase runaway cats down the street anymore. Or boys. I walked to work at the magazine every day of the summer and sweated my body weight into the Chesapeake Bay. Now, I slam out of the screen porch to go running beside the marina.

The water doesn’t change with the seasons. It doesn’t disappear like the purple hydrangeas. Doesn’t turn yellow like the ginkgo leaves. Summer and winter, it’s always blue or gray, or golden on a clear evening.

This water contains the perpetual movements of life. The blue crabs have burrowed into the muddy bottom. The sea nettles have retreated or fallen asleep. But even now, the surface ripples with pleasure against the hulls of sailboats. The light dances just as well in chilly weather.

Water in winter, in Bay Ridge

It has always been this way. I have only learned it recently, but Avery knew it first. When we drove through the mountains of the West, she would talk about water. For her, it was always alive. While I watched the pine trees beside the road, she pressed her nose to the other window and followed the riverbed till it turned.

The water is time, of course. Shakespeare spoke of “sea-change” in The Tempest. That’s what flows beneath the floorboards of my house. Sea-change. The water droplets on the front door are beads of time. We get a high ocean now and then. You can feel it when the new year turns.

“Do you know, I am filled with a strange uplift; I feel as if all time were echoing through me, as though all powers were mine. I know truth, divine good from evil, right from wrong. My vision is clear and far. I could almost believe in God.”

— Wolf Larsen in Jack London’s The Sea Wolf

Soon, the ocean will heave with the waters of springtime, and we will be tossed off the ship altogether. A two-year lease makes for a shabby vessel against these seas. I can sense their cool depths beneath me already, full of swirling riptides. Months swallow years. Life begets life. Schooners roll past with whistles and creaks.

My boat is made of old hardwood. It is painted yellow, with a pink door and blue shutters. I will say goodbye when I shake the rugs out in May. That doesn’t matter yet. It is only January.

Last year’s snow at my front door.