The astonishing resilience of my beach paradise

Malindi

  I could measure my whole life in the summers I’ve spent on the beach in front of our family’s seaside house on Kenya’s north coast. Walking along the white sand, eyes down among the flotsam, seaweed, cuttlebones and ghost crabs, for decades I have been finding shards of blue and white porcelain washed up from some lost wreck. I like to imagine they are from one of 15th-century Chinese explorer Zheng He’s ships, which carried a live giraffe back from the East African coast to the emperor in his capital. I wonder if in a lifetime I might find enough broken pieces to make an entire bowl. That seems as likely as making all my plans in life come together, but year after year I keep finding the shards. I have a photo of me as a small boy following my father on this beach, stretching to step inside his big footprints. Dad’s ashes were scattered in the waves. In coral pools at low tide, my mother first taught me how to swim, and covering the walls of our house are her paintings of iridescent reef fish. In old age she began painting the ocean, white horses and swells in angry storms, and as her sight blurred the seascapes became almost abstract. Now 94 and living in Nairobi, she saw the house last year and it’s not clear when she will come again — but I expect one day she will be joining Dad on the incoming tide. The first girl I ever kissed was here on the high-water mark after a disco — and my teenage hopes were dashed when the boy she was supposed to be going steady with suddenly turned up that same evening and whisked her away. Much later I brought Claire to this place and she still says swimming here in the evenings is what makes her happiest.