sea scents

Bargain shopper that I am, I picked up a pack of blue crabs on Friday in the seafood case, in the Day Old Fish section. HA Not Yet Day Old, and 40% off! Snapped them up with a portion of sockeye salmon, and popped in the freezer upon arriving home.

Yesterday I put on a crab boil for my lunch. ( My sister Alyson and I each fell in love with men who do not happen to share our love for seafood/fish, so we indulge when they are away. :-) It works out for all of us. ) I have never prepared a crab boil. Dunno if I did it right, and don't really care. I liked it. :-) Corn cobbettes, little blue crabs, a slice of fried bacon, some clam juice, pepper, and potatoes. Jumbled the steaming assortment in a big soup bowl, dabbed all in real live butter, and ate heartily, thinking, "Ahhhh... the smell of the sea." 

Briny, earthy, salty. Took me back to childhood days, bobbing along the jetty at Corona del Mar on the Southern California coast, checking out the mussels clinging tightly to the rocks at the base of the mile-high structure. Unseen, over on the other side, yachts and sailboats floated out of Newport Harbor out to sea while I scraped my knees on barnacles, poking at sea anemones when the tide went out.

Took me back to the homecoming Jonathan and I shared in the fall of 2011. Bob Seger softly wailed, "down on Main Street..." while we breathed deep of surf-spray and sea scent, along the palm-lined Carlsbad avenue. "Ahh, the lovely funk of the ocean," my practical man remarked, and I giggled, at him, and the apt description. Lovely funk it is. Beach air. Lovely Funk. It is lovely, and it does funk...but in a delicious way. 

I suppose it could be labeled "Sweet Sea Sweat" if one could make scented candles of it. Not such a great marketing idea, but accurate. I suppose Sweet Sea Sweat would NOT entail a lucrative endeavor. No, not so much. Candles scented with real beach air wouldn't sell. At all. Those labeled WITH sea-supposed scents rarely smell of the sea. Laundry, laundry, or laundry lingers in the air after one breathes in supposedly sea-scented wax.  Yankee Candle offers one that comes close, mostly smelling of  Coppertone lotion -- like saltwater taffy. Not the lovely true funk of the coast. 

Yeah, no. True cents of shell smell, seawater, mussels -- no market for stinky scents in the home fragrance realm. After all, Stink-Elimination IS the intended purpose of the home fragrance realm. Roses, raspberries, vanilla, lavender. Flowery, fruity, fresh-baked. Fishy? 

Mmm mmm nope. No roses or raspberries along the rocks of the jetty. Only salty/sunny/sandy scent memories. Happy ones. So true for the scent of the sea in my recent culinary adventure. Closest to home I could get out here on the prairie. 

This morning I retrieved the crab-boil pot from the refrigerator to shell the remaining corn and crab meat. Pulled off the heavy lid, and the 'beach air' rose into my kitchen like a welcome friend. Straining the butter-bacon-clam-crab broth into a freezer container, I thought lovingly of all the Good Days at the beach back home. Away from work, away from school, away, away, away, in a rare retreat from reality. I cradled corn cobbettes in my hand to shell, dug my fingers deep into the sharp shells of the now orange-y blue crabs while my memories plopped into the briny broth with the boiled bits.

Sun on my skin, sand under my feet, surf drumming a slow, inexorable, hushed heartbeat on the curved stretches of coastline. 

Good days where friends and I played in the water, achieving the Perfect Tan with Hawaiian Tropic; later my kids and I jumping the waves, making drippy castles, finding hermit crabs. Happy days with my nieces and nephews, their perfect little-kids-skin glistening with saltwater, their eyes bright, and their seaside naps deep with the hush of the waves. Hours spent on the end of the jetty with a friend, watching the water swirling among the rocks. 

If I close my eyes today, all those years later, I can still see the water rushing and bubbling and lapping around my feet. If I close my eyes today, I can see the palm trees against the blue sky and feel Jonathan's hand in mine as we went home, together, two autumns ago.

When next I pull the frozen corn-crab broth from the freezer, to thaw and simmer; add milk, butter, and more potatoes for chowder, I'll be 'home' again. For a few moments.

Lovely Funk. Better marketing. :-) Sweet Sea Scent. As Anne Morrow Lindbergh would say, a gift from the sea.