The Glittering Sea

Some days, I miss the ocean. I do after all, descend from a nation of oceanfaring vikings, and I did spend my early years in a kingdom of islands, surrounded by glittering seas. Never mind I did not inherit the unrockable bellies of the stalwart vikings ( and my father) and spent many a sailing vacation belly up and heaving over the side. That is besides the point.

The point is, now I live in a state of landlock, 500 miles from the ocean, 500 feet from a little pond that some days takes on the glittering aspect of my beloved sea. If I squint my eyes just so I can leave out the edges and the woods behind it. If I drive down the road I come across an enormous man-made dam and if I drive to just the right spot I come across a place where I can barely see the other shore and I can pretend it's a far more vast body of water than it is. Sometimes I place circling seagulls in the sky and flocks of dozens of gleaming, majestic, gliding white swans on the waters, just as I would see them in my home country.

Sometimes, like today, the sky above me reminds me of the sky above the sea on a danish spring day. Tempestuous, roiling, bright blue slipping behind clouds that promise rain but scurry on to sprinkle elsewhere, leaving the sun to peek promisingly through the fleeting gaps then shining on sudden showers of sparkling raindrops, falling gently and lightly on the upturned faces of man, beast and flower alike.

 But the scent is all wrong. There is no damp and salty whiff to brace my lungs. My skin doesn't feel the humidity of a moisture laden air and when I breathe deeply it is not tangy with the potent smell of seaweed. I do not hear the crashing of surf on rocky shores, not even the gentle lapping of waves washing over sandy beaches and tempting me with their aquamarine promises of temperate waters when in fact, they will chill me to the bone in 5 seconds flat. My Viking blood too thinned by far......but not so far I am not still stirred with wanderlust and a longing for the unknown when faced with a large body of water.

Some days, I imagine the bottom of our hill ends not in a valley but the seaside, and my view from my window is not that of treetops but that of an endless expanse of a calmly rippling sea. I imagine I can hear seagulls crying their melancholic song, and the honking of swans. I have a little boat that I  take out on quiet days when the equilibrium of my sensitive stomach will not be challenged and the wind is a gentle breeze that caresses my skin and my sails while the water laps and gurgles at my bow.

 My Viking blood has been much thinned and my longing for the ocean is but a whisper of the call that once stirred my ancestors into extraordinary oceanfaring voyages. But it's still there, enough to turn my face to the East and feel the wind come calling, filling imaginary sails. Not complete and not fullfledged, no. I'm just a Mini-Viking, I guess.