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Washing the Soul in Moonlight

© Thomas James Martin

To celebrate our mother's 80th birthday, my brother and I rented a cottage right on the Atlantic ocean at Long Beach on Oak Island located in our native state of North Carolina. We had spent many wonderful vacations there as a family when our father was living and my brother, Bob, and I were children. Our mother had expressed a desire to revisit the scene of those happy days on the occasion of her 80th.

My mother being the sensitive, caring and wise person that she is, reminded me of a phenomenon that happened many years ago on the first time that we stayed on this beach. We arrived about 9:00 in the evening, and after excitedly opening the door of the cottage and looking over the rooms and furnishings, immediately rushed out the back door onto the deck.

There, we witnessed a full moon reflecting softly but brilliantly on the ocean. The light shimmered on every wave as it broke on the shore not more than a thirty or forty feet from where we stood. It was flood tide and the ocean roared and swept in so majestically in a silver radiance..

We have always remembered the moon on the moving water that evening in June in the late 1950s. It has become a sacred memory in our family, almost a covenant between human beings, nature and the beauty of the firmament. Certainly for my soul it symbolizes being together with my family, gentle times and love of the seashore, especially the warm and sandy North Carolina coast.

Above all, it stands for my mother, for the wonderful, caring parent that she is. The memory symbolizes the sacrifices that she made every day of our lives as we were growing up to insure that we were nourished not only with proper food, covered with appropriate clothing and sheltered from physical as well as emotional storms but also exposed to books and encouraged to read and pursue higher knowledge.

The last night that we spent in our cottage this year, I went out to sit on the deck in the late evening when what should I behold but moonlight on the water but coming from a half rather than full moon. I immediately ran back into the house and brought my mother out on the deck to view the moonlit sea.

While not a rare occurrence, the moon does need to be at an appropriate angle over the ocean and of course bright enough to illuminate the waves. Over the years I have not witnessed the phenomenon very much, so it was very sweet for my mother and I to view this scene.