Most of
life’s lessons I learned by the sea.
Living along
the Sakonnet River, an inlet that stretches to the Atlantic, I measure my days
by its currents.
Every summer
I reread “The Country of the Pointed Firs” by Sarah Orne Jewett, a story about
an unnamed sojourner who relates a series of episodes taking place in a seaside
town.
It speaks to
me because Dunnet Landing resembles my home port of Tiverton and fires my
imagination urging me to tell our tale.
“After a
first brief visit made two or three summers before …, a lover of Dunnet Landing
returned to find the unchanged shores of the pointed firs, the same quaintness
of the village with its elaborate conventionalities; all that mixture of
remoteness, and childish certainty of being the center of civilization of which
her affectionate dreams had told,” Jewett wrote.
Returning to
the summer house each season, I rejoice in coming home to our sanctuary by the
sea. Surrounded by the Sakonnet on three sides, the tiny peninsula is populated
with cottages and carefully tended gardens brimming with colorful flowers.
Beach roses adorn the shoreline, and the water beyond beckons, encouraging us
to walk along its contours or sit a spell on a boulder strategically placed for
this purpose.
“For various
reasons, the seclusion and uninterrupted days which had been looked forward to
prove to be otherwise in this delightful corner of the world,” Jewett wrote.
Seeking
solitude I come to the summer place, but its beauty shouts at me; and I cannot
keep this to myself, bottling up these experiences rather than pouring them
out: the intense blue of the sky and puffy white clouds that float by, the heady
fragrance of the whispering wind, the music the breakers make as they caress
the shore.
Jewett
creates the perfect space in this beautifully crafted novel:
“On the
brink of the hill stood a little white schoolhouse, much wind-blown and
weather-beaten, which was a landmark to seagoing folk; from its door there was
a most beautiful view of sea and shore … and I spent many days there quite
undisturbed, with the sea-breeze blowing through the small, high windows and
swaying the heavy outside shutters to and fro.”
Wandering
around this little corner of the world for decades, my eyes rest on sights that
I first viewed through child’s eyes, yet seen so differently through the lens
of time. This sojourner welcomes each day as a gift and with thanksgiving perceives
the natural world as the sublime artistry of the Creator.
“It had been
growing gray and cloudy … and a shadow had fallen on the darkening shore.
Suddenly, as we looked, a gleam of golden sunshine struck the outer islands,
and one of them shone out clear in the light, and revealed itself in a
compelling way to our eyes,” wrote Jewett. … It gave a sudden sense of space,
for nothing stopped the eye or hedged one in, – that sense of liberty in space
and time which great prospects always give.”
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