selkies ovenbird In Elizabeth O’Connor’s gorgeous windswept novel Whale Fall, an islander recounts the following legend: “A man sees a circle of fairies dancing on a beach one evening at dusk. When the fairies notice him, they quickly pull on sealskins and run into the water. One fairy is left behind, running here and there as though looking for something. The man finds her sealskin before she does, and throws it into the long dune grass. The man persuades the fairy girl to marry him, and she bears him children. He always finds her trying to speak to the seals on the beach, or find her sealskin, but eventually she gives up. One year…the sealskin is found in the sand by her children, and they bring it home to her, thinking they want to keep it. Without a beat, their mother takes the skin and disappears. Her husband finds her on the beach shedding her clothes into a crumpled heap and stepping into the old skin. She dives into the water, never to be seen again.” As mothers we are selkies all…creatures who leave the skins of our old selves in the sand and clamber from the generative sea alongside our children, naked and astounded. Every one of us has dreamed of sliding back into the life that was taken. We stand at the shore of time and cry out to the waves, asking them to take us back, to reunite us with the girls we were, hair in braids and bare feet with eyes on a horizon of possibility that seems endless. But it ends. And we are swept into a world with air so thick it’s hard to breathe and the babies in our arms don’t know us at all and we ache to run as fast as our swollen legs will take us to some fairy glen where we will hold hands with the approaching twilight and weave a spell that will take us away from here. You will call us cruel, for what mother could leave their innocent child behind? But it isn’t for lack of love. No. It’s not for lack of love at all. We run because the love consumes us. Never was there a love so hungry. Never was there a love with milk teeth honed to such fine, searching points. Never was there a love that you would so willingly bleed yourself for and the exquisite wound of it terrifies. So we dream of running. We throw our clothes in the sand leaving a pile of stretched out yoga pants and wrinkled blouses, bras that never fit and jeans that, somehow, were never in style, and we pick up the skins that were ours so many years ago. They feel like silk and they feel like home and we slide into the selves we were like we never left and turn ourselves to the ocean. When the waves claim us there’s no saying if we’ll ever come back to shore. 250617 ... epitome of incomprehensibility Oof, this is gorgeous. Have you ever seen The Secret of Roan Innish? In that movie, it's a child who's a selkie, and maybe there's a similar tension between whether and how much to hold on or to let go. It's more from the sibling's perspective than a parent's, because it's aimed at kids, but it's a sweet, mysterious, and understated film (and I'm glad my brother coaxed me to watch it with him all those years ago, despite my skepticism at liking things he did, especially fantasy or Celtic myths). 250618 ... ovenbird I should really give that one a re-watch. I believe I saw it many years ago, but I can't now remember the details. 250618 what's it to you? who go blather from