A trip to the beach

On the twenty minute walk to the beach I was engulfed by the smell of lavender. I walked a little further and was overwhelmed with the smell of jasmine. I remember my trip to Grasse years ago where I toured the perfume factories. The perfumers took almost one square foot wooden boxes, filled them with an amber gel and petal by petal of jasmine formed a single layer. The gel absorbed the scent. After several days the gel is melted down and used for the perfume in various combinations.

Some web sites about Grasse: http://www.fragonard.com/ http://www.provenceweb.fr/f/alpmarit/grasse/grasse.htm and the best site is http://www.apagrasse.com/

I had earned the beach break. Not only had I added more about Pope Benedict XII to my novel Heretics and Lovers, I had nailed a scene in my novel Triple Deckers where Peggy realizes how loveless her life has been when she sees a couple hugging while waiting for the Red Line to Harvard Square. I had also cracked a story I am writing on the arts in Cork and sent out some of my last newsletters. I intend to continue writing W3 monthly but will blog it instead of emailing it. When the list went over 7500 it became too much.
The road to the beach was once all vineyards but it is now full of houses, but most have more flowers than I can identify.

The beach is the last sandy beach before Spain. The blue flag signaling the EU had tested the water and found it unpolluted was flapping in rags in the wind. Heavy winds had taken their toll. The water was 20°, the air 30°. (28° is 82°F).

I don’t worry about what people think of my body. There are too many bronzed beauties strutting around the beach to notice my chicken white skin. I stretched out my towel and shut my eyes listening to the waves, a few birds and the conversation of two young French girls. Their twittering increased. I sat up in time to see a well built young man, check to make sure they were watching. He did a quadruple somersault backwards into the water. I decided to walk along the edge of the water letting the waves break up to my knees. By the time I had come back, the young man was sitting with the girls.

Next month the beach will be towel-to-towel full, but today it was sparsely occupied. I always find a place, but then an English woman comes next to me and inevitably has a stream of speech that includes conversation like this: “Samantha, that’s not the way to hold your shovel. Simon, you need three towers on your sand castle. No, you can’t have a biscuit for another three minutes. We’re having lamb tonight, won’t that be nice. Now where is your father? I can’t stand to come to the beach, because he disappears...” and on and on and on and on. I never said I could understand that he was trying to get away. In ten trips to the beach, I have run into at least eight motor-mouth women all who sound like the sample above.

Walking back I really wished Llara could have been there. Despite having blond hair and blue eyes my daughter turns bronze if a sunbeam even comes near her. On one trip here, she was working on changing racial profiles, and decided she was a goddess in training, a tan being the requirement to make it to full goddessdom. I asked her what she would be a goddess of. “Goddess of management,” she told me.