Portion of the Sea

Books by
CHRISTINE LEMMON

Portion of the Sea

Sanibel Scribbles

Sand in My Eyes

Whisper from the Ocean

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Published by Penmark Publishing, LLC
www.penmarkpublishing.com

Copyright ©2011 Christine Lemmon

All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review to be printed in a newspaper or magazine, or on the Internet.

Distributed by Emerald Book Company

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Cover by Julie Metz. Book design by Carla Rozman.
Editorial production by Jeffrey Davis, Center to Page.

Ebook ISBN: 978-0-9837987-0-5

Ebook Edition

To John

“You hurled me into the deep,

into the very heart of the seas,

and the currents swirled about me;

all your waves and breakers swept over me.

I said, ‘I have been banished from your site;

yet I will look again toward your holy temple.’

The engulfing waters threatened me, the deep surrounded me; seaweed was wrapped around my head. To the roots of the mountains I sank down; the earth beneath barred me in forever. But you brought my life up from the pit, O Lord my God.”

—J
ONAH
2: 3-6

AUTHOR’S NOTE

THIS IS A WORK OF FICTION
. I wrote it while living on Sanibel, and my love for the area has inspired the writing. It has always fascinated me how generation after generation of families who could vacation anywhere in the world continue returning to Sanibel. My grandparents were the first in our family to fall in love with the area and move to the island.

They passed their passion on to my parents who began vacationing there from the Midwest. I was two years old when I first walked the white beaches in search of seashells, and I continued doing so all the way through college, spending spring breaks with Grandma on Sanibel. I like to think of my love for the area as being inherited.

My husband and I did most of our dating on Sanibel and later held our wedding reception there. A portion of my heart stayed even as the tides of our careers carried us geographically near and far from Florida over and over again throughout the years. John and I have lived all over the country. But just as two songbirds travel to far-off places seasonally only to return to the same nest year after year, so too did we find ourselves returning to Sanibel, this time to live. Living here has inspired the writing of
Portion of the Sea
.

The history of the island has always interested me; however, in this story I did not intend nor attempt to portray real people or real-life experiences of any of Sanibel’s historical residents or visitors. For information on the history of Sanibel, I recommend a visit to the Sanibel Historical Village & Museum. I created this story and its characters from my imagination; however, I did read historical books, and they were valuable to me. I recommend them. They include the following:

Dormer, Elinore M.
The Sea Shell Islands
. Tallahassee, Fl: Rose Printing Company, 1987. (A History of Sanibel and Captiva)

LeBuff, Charles.
Sanybel Light
. Sanibel, Fl: Amber Publishing, 1998. (An Historical Autobiography)

O’Keefe, Timothy M.
Seasonal Guide to the Natural Year
. Golden, CO, Fulcrum Publishing, 1996. (A Month by Month Guide to Natural Events)

Oppel, Frank and Meisel, Tony, eds.
Tales of Old Florida
. Secaucus, NJ, Castle, 1987.

I
SANIBEL ISLAND

1953

Lydia

There is a time in every woman’s life when pink is her favorite color, when anything is believable and the lines separating the possible and the impossible are blurred. It was that time for me when I first met Marlena, and the colors of my world changed forever
.

There are many reasons why women tell their stories. I’ll tell mine for one reason only—I never want to forget the girl I was and the dreams I had
.

IT WAS SPRING IN
Florida, and I was as much a part of the spring day as the roseate spoonbills flying overhead and the hot pink periwinkles covering the ground and the pale pink coquina shells burying themselves beneath the sand. I was shy, too, like those coquina shells.

I was sitting on a blanket spread out across the white powdery sand of Sanibel Island, with the late afternoon sun beaming down upon me when I opened my diary and began to write. This crescent-shaped island located in Southwest Florida and extending into the Gulf of Mexico, my father had told me when we arrived two days ago, was my place of conception. Ever since he shared that news with me, I had been trying to squeeze from him more juicy details regarding my conception, but I quickly learned it was one of those “hush hush” topics, the kind that makes fathers who hate any form of dancing look like they’re about to do the jitterbug.

“So you and my mother were vacationing here when my conception occurred?” I had asked him over breakfast.

“We were.”

“Define the word
conception
for me, Daddy.”

I was good at vocabulary, and my father was proud of me for this. But when I asked him to define that word for me, he looked nervous as a school- boy on stage before an audience and judges. And then he choked on his grapefruit juice. I waited until he recovered, and then I repeated the word.

“Conception,” I said. “What is the definition of conception?”

He walked over to the bookshelf and picked up the wildlife book he had been reading the night before. “Most of the year the heads and necks of brown pelicans are white,” he explained. “But during breeding season, the heads of the pelicans turn a distinctive yellow color, and the sides and back of the necks a dark reddish brown.”

“Daddy,” I said, rolling my eyes, “you’re speaking to the state of Illinois vocabulary champion. You think I’m going to accept a definition like that? I’m not.”

He closed the book and tried once more. “Much like the pelicans, there are also changes that must take place in the body of a man and woman right before conception.” He was looking back and forth at the bowl of fruit and me. “Let’s just say, after ‘courtship’ is over, the neck and heads of the pelicans return to white. I know it’s a lot to think about. Conception—it’s all so detailed.”

“One more thing,” I said. “Where exactly on the island did my conception
take place? Was it in a bungalow or on the beach?”

“Lydia!” he said, and I knew I had rattled his cage. “There are things a girl shouldn’t ask, nor know, nor think about. Enough! Understood?”

“Sorry, sir. But I am growing up.”

“You’re only fifteen.”

“Almost sixteen.”

“You could be thirty and I’d still say you’re too young to know those sorts of things about … about courtship.”

“Conception,” I corrected. “The word in question was ‘conception.’”

“Whatever,” he said. “I regret mentioning that word in the first place. It’s time to move on now. How about you start making me lunch.”

I stopped writing about it all and looked up from my pink-poodle diary, wondering whether the details of my conception meant anything at all. I did have hair as white as the Sanibel sand I was now digging my toes into, and eyes which were most days blue but on occasion green like the Gulf of Mexico. Then again my mother was a fair-skinned Irish woman with green eyes. I could probably credit her for the way I look more than my place of conception.

I often watched mothers and daughters as they shopped, drank sodas, walked in the park together, and now strolled by me on the beach, and I could always match which girls belonged to which mothers. Usually it was their hand gestures flapping about in a synchronized manner like wings of birds, or their smiles, identical to those of dolphins. Sometimes it was less obvious, and I had to match their eyes or the shapes of their hips and butts. And there were the girls who gave it away the moment they opened their mouths, sounding sarcastic, critical, uppity, or sweet like their mothers—similar to parrots repeating whatever they’d heard over and over again.

As the warm, comforting air wrapped itself around me, I tried not to feel sorry for myself, a parrot alone in its cage with no one to mimic, no one to teach me about certain words and things I wanted to know. My mother died when I was an infant, leaving me her smile, her hair, and on some days, if I wore green and stood under the right lighting, the color of her eyes. I loved to look at pictures of her, but all they told me was what she looked like.

One day I had asked my father to tell me more about her, about things she loved. And when he told me there was an island off the coast of Florida that the two of them had visited once, and that my mother had fallen madly in love with, I had to go there, to see it for myself. And if she were sitting here beside me now, I would turn to her and say, “You and I are a lot alike. I agree with you that this place is utopia.” And just as my father said that my mother never wanted to leave the island and return to the Midwest, neither did I. But after a one-week vacation here they did leave, and nine months later I was born. This was the first time my father had been back since her death nearly fifteen years ago, and we were here for a week.