The wind is rolling, rolling, and I feel the bones of the earth grind into me as I walk on the northeastern shore. My eyes are cold from the sea's breath, but the sun is on my back like steam from a pot whose lid is just opened. I smell fresh caught clams and fusilli noodles. The kitchen was warm with hungry scents, but here the air is sweet and acrid, biting while caressing, and it seeps into my being deeper than marinade and is never ending like imported wine on the back of my tongue. There is music everywhere, and the sizzling of the waves as they battle with the shore is part of it. The music grows; mint, sprouting from my head and then reaching its roots into the sky and the sparse sand, its seeds carried to distant lands by the wind.

My mother was born here, on an island now covered by a building bigger than the land it was built on. She went out in the afternoons with my great uncle to pull in the lobster traps and fish for whatever might come their way. He had a red rowboat and he would sometimes let her take the oars for the row home. Whenever she caught the scent of sandalwood, she would talk of him. It reminded her of the kind of soap he used after a long day of lobster catching. I can imagine him in the glare off the water in the hot summer sun. He wears big rubber boots and a plaid cap and I see that little girl with light brown braids laughing by his side.

I have my sweater on that Liddy, my landlady knit for me. It is white and gray, and she sewed on those buttons that I found in her collection, the ones with the gulls carved into the gray shell. At one time she was a beautiful young girl with hair the color of black cherries. When she was my age she knitted her own sweaters. She tells me stories of her schooldays and the sweethearts she had while I sweep the floor and wash the dishes in her porcelain sink.

I was so excited the day I drove the three hours from Vermont to that beautiful shore. A year ago I graduated from college and needed a place to stay. Liddy said I could live in the second floor of her house in return for me keeping the place up and helping with the housework. She hasn't been upstairs in months on account of her surgery. She finds it a bit difficult to move around much, but she does her fair share, and she already seems like a grandma to me. She's the grandma that mine should have been.

My wool skirt is flapping around my ankles, trying it's hardest to get loose from me. I'm glad I bought good sandals this summer. They are like hiking boots with straps, but even the fitful, curious sea breeze can't get through my thick socks and long johns. For a moment I stop walking on the precarious rock heads and hunker down on a little ledge to watch the water spray. The music here is strong. I look off at the horizon thinking of the land on the other side of all that water, thousands of miles to the east, where my ancestors once spoke British and survived on ale and bread and herded sheep in the green valleys. I can almost hear their voices in the wind, while the undertow pulls in and I await the next swell.

It's funny that I work in a restaurant, a strange place to be after all that hope of being an artist. But I can't put it down. It's a beautiful place, right across the street from that huge building that buried my mother's old home, but it overlooks the harbor and you can watch the boats go out to fish from the big windows in the dining hall. Just two hours ago I was boiling pasta and frying clams, singing to the Beach Boys on the oldies station and talking to Matthew Johnson, the young man who brings in the catch every day. He is 23 and has brown hair and sometimes I dream of walking with him along this beach.

The sun will go down in a few hours. The water is rough as it beats the slippery shore, like a drummer who lost his rhythm long ago, but is determined enough to keep going through the next bars of the song. The song is one that I've had in my head for years, every time we'd come to the ocean to see my mother's family. Right away I would lose myself in the crags and the precipices that was the shore, jumping across deep cuts in the rocks and leaping up the inclines with an agility that the cousins native to Maine would never know. In a place that was higher than any other, or at the edge closest to the water and farthest from land, I would stand and let the saltwater shower me, breathing in the scent of seaweed-covered rocks and hearing nothing but the crash of waves.