when i was a mermaid
The last house I lived in before leaving home boasted an inground swimming pool — a pool that could never be opened in time for my mid-May birthday, due to the cold Canadian spring. One year, before filling the pool, my parents encouraged me to paint sea scenes on the white sides and bottom. With such a festive oasis, I rued the lack of pool party to celebrate my special day.
Fifteen was my last free summer before working as a live-in waitress-slash-cabin maid at Grandview Lodge on Sparrow Lake. Summer arrived in a blast of July heat, hung around through the dog days of August, then escaped on a chilly wind just as school started and sugar maples flared red.
In those days, I wished to stay a mermaid forever: a female Peter Pan. Instead of flying through the air, I would glide underwater. Starting in the shallow end, I gulped a breath, sealed my face, then plunged beneath the surface. Cool blue closed overhead and I opened my eyes and wriggled, belly snaked along the wall of the kidney-shaped pool. I loved streaming though the dappled light, past imagined caves filled with sunken treasures, an entourage of rainbow fish bejeweling my long brown hair. Arching and looping around the deep end, I shimmied along the bottom back up to the shallows, just in time to inhale.
Flippers completed the illusion. My legs clamped together, arms soldiered at my sides, the tail fanned back and forth, propelling this mermaid along. By magic, blue rubber fins turned diaphanous as an angelfish tail.
One had to make the best of a brief Northern summer. Summer Sadness hit me first in Grade Four. At nine, I’d yet to learn what Solstice was. Imprisoned until June 30 at my pupil’s desk far from the classroom window, I felt the light already fall away from its peak. The best part of summer had passed before we were set free, leaving a mere eight weeks of wild liberation until Labor Day, woolen skirts, and Back to School.
I moved to New York City on June 13, 1984, another Summer Sadness that marked the end of youth and Canadian life, brightened by adventure and the Fool’s quest for fame and fortune.
tall ship and sailor
The summer I was twenty-seven the Statue of Liberty turned one hundred years old, celebrated by Liberty Weekend with a tall ship parade on the Hudson. I was still a New York newbie, astonished that you could J-walk across Seventh Avenue on the Fourth of July without being mowed down; the city had emptied so completely. I strolled to Riverside Park and perched on the grassy slope as twenty-two schooners, sloops, and galleons from all over the world sailed upriver, accompanied by a few hundred smaller vessels.
For my Canadian readers, imagine the deep pride I felt as the Bluenose II drifted past. As a kid, I’d seen the Bluenose on Lake Ontario, the famous ship having journeyed up the St. Lawrence River from Nova Scotia through the lock system. And here “she” was on the Hudson, blessing me with homeland memories, reassuring me on my journey in a foreign land. I was that “Face Holding Back Tears” emoji: 🥹! For my non-Canadians readers, the Bluenose graces the back of our Canadian dime.
My musician boyfriend worked on a rig, knew all the sailor songs. How we ended up together, I’ll never know: him with a woman in every port, me a mermaid without voice beyond an echo.
First I had a Spanish girl but she was fat and lazy
Away, Haul away, haul away together
Now I’ve got an Irish girl, she damn near drives me crazy
Away haul away, Oh haul away Joe
- Traditional Sea Shanty
By late July the light shifted and Summer Sadness hit me. My boyfriend was on the road and I was alone in the Big City. Life was so beautiful and fleeting, the summer so fragile and tentative. I took photos of the light on every tree and blade of grass. Real photos on film that had to be developed. The fireflies in Central Park recalled campfire sparks on High Island in the Muskokas.
That summer, I learned the hard way that love between a mermaid and her sailor is doomed.
Without realizing how, I had become his live-in waitress-slash-cabin maid, paying the rent and playing the good girlfriend, overjoyed when he returned from Italy or England or San Francisco. Until a netherish infection loosened my mermaid tail like a baby tooth.
At some point, the sailor runs aground, shipwrecked.
He nearly drowns, uncertain whether the lurking mermaid schemes to save or destroy his life. In her naïveté, the mermaid sweeps him down to her watery depths where he cannot survive — all the while herself unconscious of her bewitching beauty, the seductive innocence, those latent powers. He sinks low, never once writing her a love song, a conflicted philandering minstrel. Now, only now, does he want her so much! Too late. You sorry sailor.
She snags her tail around his heart, slithers free of her snakey skin, and flutter-kicks away. Her once-upon-a-mermaid sisters save her. She is Sedna, then Medusa, climbing out of the heavy sea, raging, unpredictable, destructive: a full-fledged woman whose purity is the price she paid to howl in a human voice.
Today, as I write, it is July 15, 2025. Even now I feel the sweet sadness of all Creation singing, a-bloom and a-buzz — yet already fading — the longer nights beginning to dry that juicy yellow-green into burnt orange, burgundy, bitter herb.
I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each.
I do not think that they will sing to me.
“The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” - T. S. Eliot
What an exquisite reverie as a mermaid. Fascinating journey as an animator. Beautifully envisioned in digital paint .
Thank you so much 😇🌟