It was a university holiday, transferred from a public holiday last month, but I went to the office anyway. It is a busy time. In just over a year, I have acquired more than a few bits and pieces, a few 'decorations'. Some I brought over from Australia, some I have acquired since arriving. For me, an office always needs reflections of one's personality. Otherwise, it is just...an office.
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If you pick it up and listen carefully, you can hear the ocean.
So said my grandmother, every time I picked up her cowrie shell on the teak coffee table in the lounge room. Now she lived on the beachfront on Sydney's northern beaches, and I spent a fair bit of my time there growing up, watching the waves with her, swimming in the ocean pool, surfing but 'not beyond the third wave', which was her rule. And she watched us from the veranda, the front patio.
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| Curl Curl to Kamakura |
But I asked one day if the sound I 'heard' in the cowrie held to my ear was simply the sound of the waves I could hear across the road.
She laughed in that way adults laughed when they were either telling the truth or passing on folklore with its whiff of whimsy.
In those days, the budding grade 8 scientist in me decided it had to be the waves across the road. Today though, when I picked up the shell, I listened, and these days, I hear my Nan.
I've now got a habit of collecting something from beaches I visit. I honour my nan in doing so. It might be pumice from Moffat, quartz from Kings, a piece of whitened coral, a shell from Kamakura or Ichinomiya. Each connects me with the beach, the waves. the sound of the cowries.
And I am at the beach again, watched over by nan, only going as far as the third wave.
Wherever I am.
[Camera : Lumix TZ-85, 4.07pm, 3 October 2017]
