Ӧhe 11.7.1998: Slate Seas and Linden Alleys

At Ӧhe now. Steve and I just walked along the seacoast under lowering skies, until it began to rain. Nice to see this place in summer—high summer—as it was dead of winter when we were last here. I’m not really a seaside person, or, at least, have never thought of myself as one. But I quite like the Baltic seacoast today. Those slate seas with hints of green, blue, even purple, are very pleasing to the eye, with small sailboats far out on the horizon. The sand has bits of a rose-colored seaweed strewn across it, in some places very artistically arranged, with pieces of a seashell that’s dark blue, with gray bands and glinting mother of pearl.

Sitting now in the cottage’s sitting room, where two large windows overlook a linden alley that runs alongside fields of wheat now gold for the harvest. Again, a vista pleasing to the eye, one restful to contemplate.

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Charles Nichols, Somebody Else: Arthur Rimbaud in Africa 1880-1891 (London: Random House, 1998): “It is a restlessness in the heart, an impossible desire: one which all travelers in some measure feel . . . .” (p. 14).