King and Queen For a Day

We bound down the stairs, out into the light-of-day, and into the blue of the misty breezes, heavily laden with the smell of wild sea salt roses that grow in perfusion along the winding road, that bends and turns in gentle lifts and dips to the other side of the bay, where it crosses the bridge and rises up and winds away, over the hill. Overhead the seagulls screech and glide over the ocean spray that washes on the rocks on the lower banks behind our house along the Fundy Bay, where we run like the wind through the fields of fresh cut hay and make our way to the rocky mantle below . There in the volcanic plateau, worn smooth as glass by the constant rolling weight of the ocean, is our pool, known by all in our village, as ‘Lizza’s Bathtub’, created by the eruption of the earth’s inner core, millennia’s ago. We slip into the still, salty water that has been warmed beneath the blazing sun, and float with the perry winkles and tiny crabs and listen to the sound of the ocean, that roars beneath us as it leaves in the receding tide, while we drift away, in our minds, my little brother the ‘King’ and I, the ‘Queen’ for a day on the ‘Fundy Bay’.