Sea Story
When my sister and I were children, we always spent our summer holidays at our grandparents’, who lived in a Russian village, just about 100 km from Kharkiv. Our dad drove us through a beautiful man-made lake, so much reminiscent of the real sea that we were just losing words when we went past it. The nearest sea is about 600 km from Kharkiv, so it was a rare chance that we ever would go there just for fun — dad and mom, and us — altogether. When we were passing by Staryi Saltov — the lake is called so — we almost never stopped. The dad continued driving because usually, we had a lot of things to do in our grandparents’ garden and household that the time was too precious to waste it for fun at the waterside. In summer!
Time flew quickly. We grew up, got our jobs, visited seas in the Eastern and Western hemispheres. The view on the sea or the ocean always makes us excited, though the very first memories from childhood are the strongest. The sea gets me stunned: it may be that kind of feeling when one faces the other element, different from the solid ground on which we tend take “serious” decisions and live our lives.
In July, my sister, her husband and I undertook a journey from Munich down to the Northern Italy. It was a short trip, though we made it to touch a piece of rural Italy and a kind of “wild” beach at one of the seashores of the Adriatic sea. We stopped at the beach, paying our share to somewhat patriarchal picture of families and elderly couples which scattered along the shore. We swam, played frisbee, walked and just enjoyed sunbathing. I like such calm, kind of patriarchal, places, as a perfect change to a hectic city life.
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Venice…was just like it imagined to be. I would rather rush north to Lago di Garda, where we stopped to take a walk and have dinner. Magnificent views, relaxed people, well-groomed embankment, yachts and windsurfers, restaurants with live music and shops with some local jewelry…a place for wealthy tourists, but I did not feel people were snobbish or unfriendly there. We would have stayed there longer if the time had not crept on us, hinting that we are even not half a way to our final destination in Munich.
All the way back, until the sun did not go down, I looked out of the window, trying to absorb that Italian scenery: emerald lake, mountains, rural cottages, enjoying the last rays of the evening sun.
Everyone has his own sea story, someone has a few. I came back home and thought — oh, how it’s important not to put off things which you like and care about the people who you love.
Italy, arrivederci. Tornerò.
