Pearl Beach

Pearl Beach

Pearl Beach photo credit: Ann Darling

High cliffs protect tiny Pearl Beach from the bite of the wind off the sea and its gentler cousin carries the scent of frangipani, salt-water, and sunscreen.  Two brown children splash and shriek and dodge the spray of the waves breaking over the edge of the concrete swimming pool, tide-filled, that someone built long ago just under the cliffs. Above us, the sky shimmers paint-box blue while a late summer storm builds out at sea.  I gulp cool fresh water and rub the icy bottle over my forehead and down the back of my neck.  It won’t rain today, despite the tease of the clouds.

Lizzy plays in the shallows of the surf, just out of my reach and farther up the sand, on the pile of striped beach towels, Crispen dozes over a magazine, taking an auntie-break while I take my turn on watch.  

We paddle along the beach, Lizzy and I, ducking the waves and floating on our backs.  I hold her until she relaxes in a slight V, letting the water cradle her, sooth her, play with her.  Her curls dance flaxen just under the surface glitter, swooping and swaying as the water rises and falls.

I am utterly content.  I love her.  I love being her grandmother.  There was a time when I thought I might not get a chance to laugh with her, so each moment is a treasure I relish.  I hold this one close and savor it.  I turn it over and celebrate its perfection, this gift.

We run out of the water and walk along the sand, spent wavelets tickling our ankles.  Here, right here for a castle, don’t you reckon?  We sit and dig and pile and dribble, the sand rough on our hands and the water silken.  We hunt clumps of seaweed and broken shells, gnarled twigs and rocks on the way to sand.  We festoon our castle moat to tower.  

We ease back to the sea to float once again, to let the sand fall away, to be held safe in this gentle afternoon.  

*****

Note:  Pearl Beach is in New South Wales,  a 2.5 hours’ drive north of Sydney, just south of Woy Woy.  Drive south out of Woy Woy, past Umina Beach on the way to Patonga in the Brisbane Waters Area and watch for the signs to Pearl Beach.   

And from my friend Ann regarding the name “Pearl Beach”:  The tide comes in and as it retracts it forms a string of pearls on the beach!!  The only place you can see it easily is from a wonderful headland – called Ettalong Point Lookout.

Grammar and Me

Author’s Note:  A small aside, here, from the usual Oz-ponderings, produced during a month-long INTENSIVE course in Teaching English as a Second Language.  

Grammar and Me

Grammar wore braids — steel-grey braids crossed over the top of a center part and anchored behind the ears.  Grammar’s blue eyes matched a grey/blue nylon print dress jerked determinedly into place and a hand-knit grey sweater slung across the shoulders.  Grammar had a wrinkled serviceable face, intelligent and animated.  Grammar demanded nothing less than your best, and grammar knew when you’d produced an inferior product.  Grammar’s name was Mrs. Noble.  Mrs. Marjorie Noble.  I took every class I could from her in high school.   

I can see Mrs. Noble at the green chalkboard, diagramming sentences.  They look like chemical formulas to me or trees with side-ways branches.  I am concentrated on the green spaces in between the shapes,  I did not see the point of learning the names of the sentence parts.  I wanted to use language freely, to rebel from structure, from established form into new form, because at 17, I was sure I’d have a brilliant new form unknown in the Western World.  

I respected Mrs. Noble as I respected few adults in those days.  And as much as I needed the structure demanded from her, I abandoned the delight in language, even as I embraced its form.  It has only been in the last few years that I have come to love using language again, to enjoy breaking the rules and allow words to lap and play at the edges of my own vision. I learned to be correct and dissect, but I lost the joy. 

I know now that any discipline has structure, has rules, has a framework;  it doesn’t matter what that discipline is.  Learning the rules gives one a starting place for rule-breaking, for free-flowing riffs and blue notes.  An exploration of the rules gives one a chance to develop meta-associations with other threads of discovery, connecting the dots from far-off places.  

Architect Mies van der Rohe said there is “ecstasy within the box” and that is what structure and discipline are: a box.  I have a friend who is a terrific poet.  Poetry is a form that requires enormous discipline.  When times are good, we spend a week on Lake Shasta with our friend.  At night, by the light of a Virgin of Guadalupe candle and a serious consideration of the vintner’s, distiller’s, and brewer’s arts, he reads his poetry.  I lay my rekindled interest in language at his feet.  How beautifully the words flow, echo each other, juxtapose, and clash.

Now grammar has more than steel-grey braids.  Now grammar is discipline which delicately tethers unrestrained freedom.