Title: Dès l'aube
Author: Ellie (windblownellie@yahoo.com)
Summary: "And suddenly the memory struck me."
****
The door slid easily shut behind me, leaving me alone
in the early-morning darkness. Like an errant child,
I scrambled across the weathered wood deck and onto
the snowy cold sand, which has lost all its warmth in
the black night. Above, the stars are imperceptibly
fading into the sky, which has just begun its fade
from indigo to sterling to blue.
I have always marveled that the poets have so many
words for that time of evening between sunset and
darkness--dusk twilight gloaming--yet there exists no
word I know for this time of morning when it is not-
quite-dawn. This unnamed time is why I am a morning
person, happy to watch the stars fade in the face of
our own bright one.
As the daughter of a sailor and a student of physics I
could explain it, of course. The track of the stars
as they pinwheel across the heavens, leading mariners
home. How that leading light shines back from a time
before man could even dream of sailing across the
seas.
The sky was just lightening to gray when I stepped
onto the sand, cool and soft against my feet. I am
not hurrying this morning; there is half an hour of
this magic time before the sun will have burnt away
the riding mist and begun heating the sand once more.
With little heed to where I walked, I watched Venus
flare and begin to fade in the east as I strode to the
dock. Its wood is rougher than the sealed deck
surface, blemished by sun and salt and time and tide.
The mist was rising off the water then, clinging about
my cotton pajamas and resting on my skin.
With a flick of my tongue against the corner of my
lip, a droplet was caught, its briny taste drawing me
back from this predawn beach to all the beaches I have
passed my youth upon, always so dissimilar yet the
same.
We stayed in an earlier permutation of this cottage
when I was a child. Often before breakfast we
children would race down here, half-awake in swimsuits
we'd likely slept in, thundering across the dock
planks that were then bright and new. We wouldn't
have noticed danger or splinters, then. There used to
be a buoy a hundred yards out, and we would race down
and dive off the dock, paddling with all our youthful
might to tag it and slip back to shore before the
others. I often won, even being so little, as I
slipped through the waves with the ease of a dolphin,
too little and light to need to struggle much against
current and tide. Charlie once tried to trip me as we
were racing down the dock and fell, himself. We were
sitting down to breakfast before we noticed the bloody
red grin of a broken tooth.
I always turned an angry red in the summers, too, the
same bright shade as the steamed crabs we enjoyed for
dinner. They were never red to begin with, of course,
being blue crabs. Like the morning sky, they began a
deep slate when we fished them out of the bay by the
dock, with bits of chicken on string or even old crab
claws; they weren't shy about cannibalism. They
turned bright scarlet as we steamed them, scrambling
to get out, in a pot with beer and spices. I turned
the same bright color as I sat and ate them on the
deck, sun burning my skin as the spices burned my
tongue.
Spices still on our unwashed hands, we would pound
across the sand to the gentle surf, ignoring Mom's
admonitions to wait thirty minutes. Our dinners had
come from this water, surely it could do little harm
to dive back into it, ourselves. It never seemed to
hurt us. If we were quick with our seasoned fingers,
we could catch all manner of marine life in these
waters. The dinner shellfish--mussels and oysters and
clams and scallops--presented no challenge to us after
our first summer on the shore.
It was better and braver to capture something more
exotic. A crab scuttling across the sand before it
could sink a vengeful claw in you. A horseshoe crab,
looking ugly and vicious as it searched the shallows
for lunch. The boys, too, were taken with fishing off
the dock and I never understood the allure; with my
bare hands in the calm water, I could snatch the same
fish they hooked with rod and reel. The secret was to
remain completely still and flicker one's fingers just
under the surface. The fish drew near, thinking them
insects, and could be handily grabbed by those with
quick reflexes. I was the only one of us to master
the trick, though my father knew it as well.
I had been amazed when I explained the skill to him
and received a knowing smile in response. He'd taken
me out to the dock again that night and begun to teach
me about the stars. My soul remembers, even if my
mind has sublimated tales of Orion's heroics with
knowledge of the nebulas contained therein. I learned
all the constellations and could have navigated by
them as well as he. Like catching the fish, it was
not a difficult skill once one knew the trick. North,
always find north. Why, when our compasses could just
as reliably be said to point south? We followed
Polaris before we discovered the compass. I can
always find north and my way home, he'd said. It all
seemed so simple then.
It was never the same, staring up at the stars from an
observatory as a student. With my father's warm arm
around my shoulders and voice low in my ear, they had
been historical and supernatural, winged horses and
evil queens and angry bulls. They became concentrated
points of matter, burning warm red and orange or
inconceivably hot blue and white. There was reason
order explanation, but none of the warm romance that
the ancients must have felt, that we share as children
gazing up to something astronomically larger than
ourselves.
Our own bright star burned away the mist from my skin
with the harsh true light of morning. I turned away
from the dock and crossed the warming sand, toward one
who retains his romantic wonder, despite all he knows.
****
Fin
****
Author's Notes: The idea for this sprung from a
comment on The Haven about writing a piece in the
style of a famous author. This was obviously inspired
by Proust, but I don't know that it's terribly
Proustian, though I thank him for the idea and the
summary. I also borrowed from Victor Hugo's sublime
poem, "Demain, dès l'aube" ("Tomorrow, at dawn"), for
which I have sadly been unable to find an English
translation that approximates the feel of the
original; I've tried myself here:
www.geocities.com/windblownellie/aube.htm
Feedback and your thoughts on all this would be much
appreciated.
windblownellie@yahoo.com