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My father believed the sea to be covetous: a pleading dog that would lap at you adoringly, sidling up the beach to dawdle hungrily round your ankles He said not to trust its sidelong ways, because when he was out in his fishing boat during a storm, the sea became a hound that could shake the whole world in its teeth Out there, he had heard the entire ocean howl like the bereaved He had seen waves bigger than a church standing atop a church and believed there is nothing you can do in the face of such demands   Father believed the sea to be a jealous god, hungry for sacrifice, but I think it is something blanker and simpler than that I would say that to meet the sea is to look into the face of God and find it faceless But nobody talks to me anymore, so I keep such thoughts to myself   From here at my place by the fire in our small house, I can hear the waves on the beach, and the rhythm of the sea is soothing to me It comforts me like the rub of butter, like the click of my sister Margie’s knitting needles, as she huddles in her black dress making endless tiny clothes for the new baby, unspooling her threads unto infinity   *   It used to be that when the wind roared and the sea boiled like a bubbling pot, snapping at sailing boats, threatening to swallow them whole, we would go to pull the lifeboat out The women of our village would run to the shore and heave on ropes to drag the boat down the beach, hearing the rubble rubble of the wooden hull as we hauled it over pebbles, the men onboard holding up their oars and jeering down at us And the rumbling roll and then the sweet perfect crash as it swung down the shingle and into the ocean blue green grey purple gold and sometimes black and sometimes silver   Usually, when the men went out – my father and brother among them – we would head