A love of the Sea Channeled Through A Lovely, Historic Poem-- Sea Fever by John Masefield

Miles first day at the ocean at two weeks old

Waxing Poetic About 
Our Impending "EMPTY NEST"
From a Blog I Built on "NESTING"

Tonight is the eve before Miles' moves into his dorm as a Freshman in college, and I am getting philosophical...my baby is growing up. As I think about this, I miss my mother and wish she was here to tell me what it was like when we left home. Then, I notice on my bedside table the book she gave me many years ago, Sea Fever. I have long been inspired by the book, a poem written over 100 years ago, words that touched me as a teenage girl.

When I was in high school, we moved from my sea-side town Port Jefferson in Long Island, New York to Chittenden, Vermont. We relocated from our little cottage (a former sea captain's cottage perched overlooking the Port Jefferson ferry on East Broadway) to rural Vermont. I missed my picturesque town, and my life surrounded by boats and the ocean.

I eventually grew to love and appreciate the Green Mountains, but as one can imagine, I was homesick and pined away for my life back in New York. For Easter that year, my mother gave me this small book, Sea Fever, and the book is one illustrated poem about the author's deep love for the ocean. Written by famous writer John Masefield hailing from the beginning of the last century (1921).

My mother scribbled a poignant note in the inside cover of this book to me telling me she knows how much I love the pull of the ocean, and she suspects I'll go back and never far away from what I love. She wrote about how much she loved me. I have kept that little book by my bedside at our East Hampton beach house for 20 years. It is no mistake I found myself back on Long Island decades later, and chose it as the place for us to raise our children.

This week, as we cross the country to drop our youngest at college, I am reminded of that pull of the sea. All his life, Miles has loved the ocean-- When he was a newborn, he loved water and it calmed him. As he grew, he was an early swimmer and played for hours in our pool. As a teenager he would swim way out into the ocean and make me nervous when he was a mere speck on the horizon. Later, he sailed, wake boarded and surfed. Today, he is a writer and a poet himself, and it only fitting to pass this book onto him with a note from his grandmother to me, then add my own thoughts about how much I love him, how much I will miss him, and to tell him I suspect and hope he'll be back to the pull of the ocean after a jaunt to the midwest.

Happy Nesting 

XO Tamara