Rose of the Sea
There are little girls in the ocean, my grandma said.
They live in castles of twisted seaweed and breathe through their toes, buried deep in wet sand. Their mirrors are made of sea glass, worn smooth in the arms of the waves, their hair curls of muted green and dazzling blue.
When you hear a seal bark, she said, that’s their call to come home.
My grandma was born of the ocean, a rare Rose of the Sea. Every day we visited her mother and she stepped in up to her ankles before melting away.
I sat on the beach and watched for her, trying not to blink. Sometimes I managed to catch a glimpse of her silver hair as she passed back into our world from the sea.
She swam like a fish, like she was one of the those little ocean girls who had grown up and somehow gotten lost on the land. She’d grown up, had a family, stumbled along through life living happily enough. But in the ocean she remembered who she was and transformed into the water she was meant to be.
She sometimes asked me to join her, but I never did. I was scared of those little girls. I didn’t want them to laugh at my awkwardness, because I was a child of land.
So I sat on the beach and played in the sand, a daughter of the earth whose grandma was a fish and a flower of the sea. I collected shells and feathers and bits of broken sea glass. I dug holes so deep I reached other worlds . I met a man who I thought was a tree come to life because his skin was so worn and so brown. Grandma explained he was a man who was in love with the sun and I guess I thought that was okay.
After a while my grandma would find the strength to say goodbye to her mother, to reform her human body and step back on the ground. She was a mermaid who picked legs over fins because she knew she would be back tomorrow. She would come sit with me on the sand, grains sticking to her wet legs, and ask me what I had found. Sometimes I had grand treasures to share, sometimes nothing special. She never seemed to mind.
There are little girls in the ocean, my grandma said.
They live in castles of twisted seaweed and when one of their sisters comes home, they throw a grand party. They gather all the crabs they can find and put them straight to work, separating out only the softest and most beautiful grains of sand to pad their sister’s steps. The seagulls are their helpers, keeping watch over the skies and the clouds at bay while the ocean glimmers in the sun. The seals and sea lions come together to bear their sister, should she have forgotten how to swim.
My grandma was born of the ocean, a rare Rose of the Sea. There she swims with the little girls, their prodigal sister come back home to stay.
