Nel Blu, Dipinto Di Blu

I’m at the beach today. Not the sandy kind, the rugged, cliffside kind. We are in Polignano A Mare, laying on sunchairs under a yellow umbrella. It’s nice to hear Italian spoken by the other beach goers. Nice to finally assimilate. 

I survey our sunchair neighbors. An elderly woman with silver hair and lean, golden limbs gets up in search of food. There’s a young couple beside her, both tanned and toned. The girl, in a revealing leopard print bikini, sunbathes with a blank expression. Her boyfriend surveys her body admiringly, making suggestive glances. She rolls her eyes and waves him away as he leans in for a kiss. He seems to enjoy this more than if she had complied. 

Two chairs over is a man with three young children. He’s in very tight blue bikini briefs. His legs are matted with black curly hair, damp from his swim. I happen to catch his eye as he yells at his kids to stop running, and his stern expression quickly becomes a polite smile. He nods his head and calls me “signorina”. I appreciate the kindness of subtracting a few years by avoiding the much more obvious “signora” and so I smile back. 

No waves are crashing. The ocean is calm. The temperature has hovered in the 40’s for days, warming the waters to delicious bathing temperatures. It spreads out before us, turquoise and beckoning. The pool, also a short distance away, is blasting Cool And The Gang on loud speakers. It strikes me as an odd choice of music for this Adriatic oasis, but somehow, like everything else in Puglia, it works.  I watch the crowds at the pool and wonder how anyone would choose to swim there when the gloriously blue sea is in such close proximity. 

I decide to venture down the short dock to the ocean, flip flops squeaking with my every step. The ground will burn the skin right off your feet if you don’t wear something to protect them. I get to the ladder, add my flip flops to a pile of accumulated footwear discarded there and descend. The cool water makes me gasp slightly but then I exhale appreciatively and swim. It’s deep, but not so deep that you can’t touch a rock if you really tried. I feel refreshed.

I float on my back, and squint at the sun, eyes stinging from the mixture of wet sunblock and salt water. Not one single cloud in the sky. The water pokes in and out of my ears, silencing all in sporadic spurts. I start to feel something come over me. Something distantly familiar that I can never quite conjure on my own. Peace.