City by the Sea

It's your average Sea City. Sun and sand and sea and gulls and cottages and waving palms.

I can't say palm trees are my favorite. I'm more of a pine person. It doesn't matter: standing by the sea makes one feel so small that any thought about the kind of trees present is swallowed up in the immensity of the world.

The water was warm enough to swim, but not so much that you didn't spend half of the time running back to the shore mumbling something about blistering barnacles and it being cold.

Instead, I walked along the beach with Mother and made many interesting encounters.


The Portuguese Man o' War is not a jellyfish, or indeed a single animal. It is a combination of four colonies of different animals, one for the digestive system, one for the reproductive system, one to capture prey, and one for the floater.


This beautiful Long-billed Curlew was not afraid of us.


The seagulls settled down to admire the view.

We spent the week together in a small, cramped cabin which nevertheless was bigger than the whole of the apartment in which I grew up. The nights we spend crowded around the tiny table, playing Tarot. For the first time in years, Mother played with us too.

On the way home, Sis, Bro, and I were busy in the backseat comparing the white spaces between our toes and the intensity of sunburns.

It was a holiday well spent, in the manner of holidays at the beach. Some sand worked itself into every crevice of our belongings, there was algae in the towels and seashells in Bro's pockets.