Skinny-Dipping in Vathy
by Barbara Quick

Above the azure inlet of the sea,
the path was steep, carved out between
the thistles, thorns and wind-blown rock.

He left her at the top to find a sheltered place
they wouldn’t be seen descending to the shore.
She waited, fully clothed there,
till, looking down, she saw his gleaming skin
and upturned face above the churning deep,
as if he’d changed from man to seal
and loved this transformation.

She shed her clothes and picked her way
as far down as she could on tender feet—
then took a leap of faith, exchanging rock
for empty air, a rush of cold and bubbles
in her hair. Her toes touched seaweed
as she swam toward her selkie mate.

Two naked, slippery people,
seventy and sixty-five,
feeling so alive and filled with joy,
treading water side by side in the extra-salty,
turquoise blue Aegean Sea, rich in iodine,
with the power to heal
all kinds of wounds.

They tasted salt and kissed,
two shipwrecked sailors
who’d managed to survive.


Barbara Quick, “Skinny-Dipping in Vathy” from The Light on Sifnos. Published by Blue Light Press. © 2021 Barbara Quick. (buy now)

It’s the birthday of the man who said, “Live in the sunshine, swim in the sea, drink the wild air.” That’s Ralph Waldo Emerson (books by this author), born in Boston (1803). His father, who died when Ralph was eight, was a Unitarian minister, as were many of Emerson’s family members before him. He was a quiet and well-behaved young man, not an exceptional student. He graduated in the middle of his class, studied at Harvard Divinity School, and got a job as a ministerial assistant at Boston’s Second Church. Not long after his ordination, he was married. He was happy at home and in his work and soon he was promoted to senior pastor.

Two years after Emerson was married, his wife, Ellen, died of tuberculosis at the age of 19. He was devastated. He began to have doubts about the Church. A year after Ellen’s death, he wrote in his journal, “I have sometimes thought that, in order to be a good minister, it was necessary to leave the ministry. The profession is antiquated. In an altered age, we worship in the dead forms of our forefathers.” He took a leave of absence and went on vacation in the mountains of New Hampshire. By the time he returned he had decided to resign from his position as minister.

Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote, “Finish every day and be done with it. You have done what you could; some blunders and absurdities no doubt crept in; forget them as soon as you can. Tomorrow is a new day; you shall begin it serenely and with too high a spirit to be encumbered with your old nonsense.”

It’s the birthday of writer Jamaica Kincaid (1949) (books by this author), best known for her trenchant, sometimes vitriolic, writing on the effects of colonization and corruption in the Caribbean, particularly her birthplace of Antigua. She was born Elaine Potter Richardson in St. John’s, Antigua, a small island colonized by the British in 1622. Antigua didn’t achieve independence until 1981. Though Kincaid received a colonial education, studying the Bible and reading Paradise Lost by John Milton, she was a girl, and a poor one at that, so her prospects were very narrow. Kincaid grew up without electricity, running water, or plumbing, but her mother gave her an Oxford English Dictionary for her seventh birthday, and words became her solace.

Starting when she was nine years old, her mother gave birth to three boys in quick succession, an event that left Kincaid bitter and confused. Boys were more valued than girls in Caribbean society and though she was bright, Kincaid said, “I never heard anybody say that I was going to be anything except maybe a nurse. There was no huge future for me.”

Her mother was busy with the babies and her stepfather was ill. At 16 her mother pulled her from school so she could work to help support the family. Soon after that, her mother sent her to the United States to work as an au pair in Scarsdale. Kincaid was so angry that she refused to send money back to Antigua and did not open her mother’s letters. She said, “The way I became a writer was that my mother wrote my life for me and told it to me.”

Many of her writings reflect the issues of mother-daughter relationships

As an au pair, she took evening classes at a community college and soon moved to New York City where she changed her name to Jamaica Kincaid, explaining that it was a way “to do things without being the same person who couldn’t do them — the same person who had all these weights.” She wrote for The Village Voice and Ingenue and soon found herself writing “Talk of the Town” features for The New Yorker, which she did for nine years. There were strict rules about the “Talk of the Town” pieces: they couldn’t discuss sex, or use curse words, for instance. Kincaid reveled in the work, though: she wrote about the West Indian American Day carnival, comedian Richard Pryor, and socialite Gloria Vanderbilt. Those essays were collected in the book Talk Stories (2002).

Kincaid’s first novel, Annie John, was published in 1985. It had first been serialized in The New Yorker. Annie John is the coming-of-age story of a young girl in Antigua. When asked about the similarities between her upbringing and Annie John’s, Kincaid shrugged, saying, “I write about myself for the most part, and about things that have happened to me.” She continued to mine her own experiences in her second novel, Lucy (1990), and in her book The Autobiography of My Mother (1996). See Now Then (2013), her fifth novel is about a bitter marriage in which the husband leaves his wife for a younger woman, a musician. In real life, Kincaid’s husband, Allen Shawn, left her for a younger woman, a musician. Kincaid says, “Everything I say is true, and everything I say is not true. You couldn’t admit to any of it in a court of law. It would not be good evidence.”

Be well, do good work, and keep in touch.^®

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