Words Abigail Peters
Every summer, it went like this. Pack up the car, lock the windows, drop the cat off with the neighbour and drive to Auchenlarie. My father in the front, beside my mother who cradled the map, held the steering wheel like a fragile thing. He would write the lists of place names we would pass and I would press my face to the window, nose turned up against it, and call them out, trying out the words for size in my mouth. The sea would trot along beside us on our pilgrimage as we left our flat patch of England for Scotland. How lucky we were, to be chased by the water, to be hunting it.
The first thing, the only thing, to do upon arrival was go to the beach. Here are my memories of my father, and here the stage they play upon. I remember the way the sea was both hesitant and desperate to lay upon the sand, the rocks he lowered his towering frame upon, the sand he pushed his feet into. We were the only people in the universe; my mother, my father, and I. I ran along the edge of the water, eluding it, ankles deep, then dry, shivering in my swimming costume, pausing to gather a rock or two, a rock my mother would take home and wash in an old butter tub and leave drying beside the sink so that we might have the sea in our house, so that we might be people from the sea.
***
The last place we went, before my father was confined to the house, was Auchenlarie. I suppose it is tradition, when people are dying, to take them to the sea. It was not cold but he felt it and so we wrapped a blanket around his shoulders. Like an anchor, my mother and I were boulders beside him.
‘See that boat over there,’ my mother said, extending one long arm to a smudge on the horizon. ‘See I wonder where it’s going.’
I could not say a word because I could not think of anywhere else to go. The world was on that beach. The world, my world, began there.
‘Do they say you sail to Valhalla?’ she continued, filling the silence.
‘No,’ I said, and the word felt strange on my tongue. ‘You’re carried there.’
***
After running along the beach, feeling my lungs expand and quiver with the whip of sea air, it was time to climb. I would do this barefoot, hair stuck in my mouth, summer blistered feet relishing the crush of sand beneath them. I would grip the prehistoric twists of the cliffside and pull my body up. My mother would fret, and she would love me through her fear. My father, standing beneath, arms slightly open like a bird about to take flight, would call out, ‘Keep going, keep going!’ Then, at the top, clinging to earth and trembling rocks, I would turn, crane my neck and look down upon the earth. From up there I could see the perfect vision of it; sand meet water, rock meet grass, human meet world.
***
When my father lost the last of his memories and his ability to swallow and my name, he retained one wisp of the past, and all that life we packed into it.
‘The water, like this,’ he said, moving his hand like a fish above his bedsheets.
‘That’s right, remember it was our beach, remember we were the only people in the world.’
‘We’ll go to the beach tonight,’ he said.
Even though he never left that bed again, when he slept that night his eyes moved beneath the paper fragile cover of his eyelids and I knew that we shared the same dreams.
***
It was not always sunny, those weeks we spent on the beach, but I loved it all the same. Sometimes, I loved it more when it was ferocious, when the rain spat heavily into the water. That rain, I would tell my father, was once water on the surface of the earth and now it’s coming back. Later, it will be rain again. He would nod intently, t-shirt growing damp with the force of the storm, nod even though I had already told him this.
I would grow bored of talking to him; the curse of a child who has not yet lost anyone. I would sit on my haunches and watch the rain gather in rock pools until they overflowed. I would hold hermit crabs in my wet hands, pooled like offerings. I would lie down on mud-like sand, feeling the weight of the rain pushing me down into it, wondering what it would be like to have seen that beach when it first ever existed, wondering if there was ever a time that it didn’t exist, concluding that that couldn’t possibly be true.
***
What is grief, really, if not a tide? If not a back and forth, push and pull. Disappears, it does, in the swell of the day, the sunshine bloated middle of the year, the dip of a decade, but it returns, like a loyal, faithful dog with sunset. I am here. You can’t forget me. So, you guide the dog home, you remove the dead animal from its jaw. So, you pack up the sandwiches, you roll up the blankets, you close the book. So, the water is coming. The water was always meant to come back.
***
Once my father was safely encased in the earth, my mother and I returned to the beach. We traversed the coastline with our shoes in our hands. Planes do not often fly over that patch of the earth but, still, I imagined how high you would have to go in order for us to no longer be decipherable from the earth and water. Would we look like the sand, or rather like the foam of the sea?
‘When I’m dead,’ my mother began before looking up at the blue sheet of the sky. We had grown comfortable talking about death, in the way that, growing up in the countryside, I had to grow comfortable with the spiders that made homes in the rafters and the foxes that screamed in the darkness. ‘When I’m dead, I want you to take my ashes back to Carrickfergus.’
‘To the sea?’
‘That’s right.’
‘So one day you’ll come back as rain.’
***
When I die, as I will with certainty, there will be no one left who remembers my father. I return to the beach to remember. I also go there to forget. How big it feels to be the only person standing on this miraculous curve of the earth. How small. The sea and the sand. The sky and the murmurations of birds that call it home. The anemone-like grass, resolutely growing through the cracks in the rocks, yielding to the breath of the summer breeze.
How much agony has this twist of a beach seen spill upon its shore? How much love? How many first steps, how many last breaths? My father’s hands were upon that patch of grass there, his long limbs were washed by the same water that has always, will always, lay upon the earth. How miraculous that he was, that I am, that we all are, a part of this endless cycle of the tide.
Look, look, there, see how the sand still bears the impression of his feet upon it.
Abigail Peters
A writer from East Anglia, Abigail Peters currently lives in Iowa City, pursuing her MFA in fiction from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where she is a Truman Capote Fellow. She writes about grief in girlhood, mothers and daughters, and the isolation and beauty of the countryside. She is deeply inspired by working-class lives, the Fenlands and the Norfolk coastline. In 2023, she received the Clarissa Luard Award from Arts Council England for her work.
- ‘Nature Writing Competition 2025 Winner: ‘Here, My Father and the Sand’ by Abigail Peters’ by Abigail Peters’ is published in Anthology Volume 25. Read more features from this volume or buy it now.
- Browse more in literature.
- If you were inspired by this feature, we’d love it if you would share it!
- Why not enter one of our creative competitions? See all Anthology Awards.