By Rees Quilford Each day of our first COVID winter I left the warmth of our new home, meandered through sleepy streets, over the dunes, down to the same secluded stretch of sand that marks the threshold between shore and sea. I walked the vacant coastline then dove into the bracing cold to swim in the sea. Every day of that arduous winter, all ninety-two of them, I returned to the same place in search of something different. Once there, I sought to reconnect with that once familiar place. The shoreline I visited is a place of my childhood and adolescence, the Cape Paterson Bay Beach, the unobtrusive shoreline of a quiet seaside village in the heart of Victoria’s Bass Coast. It’s a haunt I’ve known since birth, one that elicits fuzzy recollections of sunburnt skin, chapped zinc smeared lips, and dawdling fishing. |