Moloney's Strand

Can places hold a memory of the future?

Because, when I see it, I remember almost instantly.

Moloney’s Strand. The beach there.

The diagonal path and how it sits at a specific angle to the lane.

The wide metal farm gate that leads to it, the small scratchy walkway down to stream-etched sand.

I thought we’d never been here before,

but when I see that grass-edged path, I remember.

And I know for certain when it was.

Over 16 years ago. When we were a family of three.

So complete and yet,

with a sense of a gap.

Moloney’s Strand.

Moloney’s Gap.

Then

the rush of knowing.

I’ve been here before! I’ve been here before!

As I walk, open-mouthed in wonder, down that diagonal path,

the thought strikes, unbidden,

‘I know you.’

*

It was another time, a significant time, a turning point. Perhaps the real turning point came earlier, but that day is a touchable tangible memory of an otherwise vague and murky stage of life.

I had been stumbling through a dark place, the constant bumping along of hope and despair. But that day, sixteen maybe seventeen years earlier, we walked down a diagonal path from a tiny lost lane.

The tide was in, the day was grey. Was it 2007 or 2008? February half-term or Easter? I only know I had emerged from the darkness, blinking as the light of hope hit my eyes.

All winter and the summer before, and the winter before that too, years really, I had held a sadness. A knowledge that the thing I ached for was beyond my control, placed in the distance, just out of reach.

Then, a decision. Even if I couldn’t change it, perhaps I could do things differently. Look at it from another angle, like that skewed diagonal path.

Could I be joyful?

Run a little rather than dragging my feet?

Not the rush-filled run of my juggled life of young motherhood and work at that time. A different run. A run with no rush, a run for sheer enjoyment.

I don’t remember exactly when I decided that my longing for a second child shouldn’t navigate my whole life; that gratitude for the incredible life I had, for the one wonderful child I had, should govern my thoughts instead.

Even before we visited Moloney’s Strand that day, I had started on the diagonal path. This was just a continuation. But that day, way back when, on that beach, I only felt gratitude. I ran childlike across the sand, uncaring of stupid appearances. The sky was grey and dank but the sea was lively, wild and free as I ran down to the water with the knowledge that, whatever happened, I had this.

So much.

I wonder now, do places hold memories as well as give them?

Was there some kind of foresight in the steps I took that day, running across the paper-thin pools of water?

Did the sand already know I would return, over sixteen years later, with my son,

the child I had longed for, for so long?

The dream I gave over to God in the waves that day.

*

Now, years later, we wander the long stretch of watery sand again. This time, the weather is so bad it’s good – the silver haze of rain hovering over miles of velvet beach. The tide is out and everything is white with mist and light, the flat flat sands smoothed over by a glass-thin layer of sea. Tiny lines of wrinkles.

My God. How beautiful. How awesome this creation. How grateful I am.

And the child I had longed for all those years before, walking beside me, towering over me, a few weeks shy of 16-years-old.