My Mother’s Marbles

By Jono Walker

My mother, Joy Walker, was a fearless body surfer and taught me to be one too. There wasn’t a wave we would hesitate to swim out to in any weather short of hurricane force winds at any point along the two miles of beach at Biddeford Pool. Stretching out in the clear hollow of a towering breaker and seeing your shadow appear for a split second on the sandy bottom just before everything crashes down in a pandemonium of sound and foam is such a rush. We’d fight through the icy undertows looking for the next great ride until our feet could no longer feel the sand and our lips were blue as crabs.

But Joy wasn’t just about daring and speed. She had a contemplative side and was an inveterate explorer of tidal pools with a life-long collection of blue and green sea glass that will never be surpassed in terms of color and opaque purity. No raw edges in her collection. Nothing see-through. Every piece different. Each one perfect. 

Joy Walker, around age 40.

 Mom’s grandfather, the Reverend Philip Schuyler, was the first summer minister of St. Martin’s, the church that now stands on the golf course in what was just a sleepy fishing village before President Taft paid a brief visit to Biddeford Pool in 1910. This turned the place into a kind of secluded resort for extremely wealthy people from Ohio…and us.

In those days a boardwalk carved a mile-long loop around East Point, which was where the Reverend took his morning constitutionals with grandchildren in tow. The first side of the loop took them through canyons of scruffy pines and bayberry bushes, offering bright blue glimpses of the little islands dotting Saco Bay, with easy access to rocky tidal pools. When the pathway left the woods and spilled onto an open field, the ocean was spread before them on all three sides, aiming straight towards the rocky point Mom called “The End of the World”.

When I was a kid things began to change, but Maine was still Maine. The big old hotel was converted into a Catholic retreat (locals dubbed it “The Nunnery”) and the boardwalk around the Point was left to rot except for a few splintery sections that remained half buried in the clumps of sea grass along the inside arch of Little Beach. Gardeners working for the people living in the enormous mansions that were eventually built out towards the Point started dumping grass clippings and kitchen scraps onto mulch piles that were strategically placed where the boardwalk used to be on the far edges of their long sweeping lawns. It was a deliberate attempt to discourage recalcitrant point walkers like us, but that didn’t put an end to our ritual. We just skirted around the steaming debris determined to keep the public right-of-way open until years later when my kids were small and the mulch piles had finally grown too big and the bayberry and the scratchy beach plum bushes around them had become completely impenetrable, forcing us, at last, to wave the white flag and take our morning strolls on the Big Beach. 

Joy at the Point

Mom lived the last of her days sitting in a chair in a place called Maplewoods. It was nice there, but the old girl – who cheerfully admitted in a rare moment of cognitive clarity that she had lost just about all her marbles – was soon running on nothing but the microdots of distant memories. One time, even though she couldn’t have told me what she had eaten for lunch or named any of her grandchildren in the photos hanging on her wall, I caught her looking over at her mason jar of sea glass sitting on the windowsill. Something bright and clear flickered across her eyes. Faint synapses deep inside her clouded brain were feeling gentle breezes from summers long since passed. She bent a little forward in her recliner just as a breaker curled, shooting her all the way to the beach. At the end of the ride she rises up on her elbows, the water retreating beneath her thighs. She looks over at me, blinking out the salty sting. When she sees that we caught the same wave and are beached together her whole face lights up. Wow! she shouts over the roar of the churning surf before turning back over her shoulder, hoping to spy the next big roller building out on the horizon. 

Nestling again into the back of her chair, she now has a child in hand, tiptoeing around the barnacled edges of a tidal pool out on the Point. An icy wave comes sluicing between the rocks and splashes white and foamy around her ankles making them ache for a second before sucking back over a chattering bed of small glittery stones. No, she says about the piece of sea glass the child presents to her. The edges aren’t yet smooth enough for the jar. Throw it back. Let some other kid have a turn to come and find it. Later, when it’s good and ready.