The Clamdigger

Submitted to the 750 Word Project 2024.

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I wish I was a painter.

I have a picture I want to paint. A vivid image in my mind that I long to share.

My father abandoned us when I was four years old, leaving my mother on her own with two young children. Food stamps and housing subsidies were not enough to get by. She took whatever under the table work she could find; cleaning houses, picking apples, shoveling snow.

When I was seven or eight years old, she was earning some extra money digging clams. The thing about clamming is that your schedule is set by the tides. If low tide is in the middle of the night, you strap on your head lamp and go to work on the flats. It's hard labor, cold and wet and lonely, even in the summer. A clammer spends hours bent over, often in mud above their knees, scanning for the telltale bubbles that reveal their quarry, then digging with their hoe until they uncover it and toss it in their bucket.

One night, my mother woke up my brother and me. I don't know what time it was, but it was a cold starry night. She bustled us, wearing our pajamas and slippers, into our coats and hats. With sleep still in our eyes, we carried our blankets and pillows out to the car. It was an old station wagon, and we made beds in the back. I drifted off to sleep as she drove down dark country roads.

When we arrived at the shore, she woke us again and told us to stay in the car, that she would return in a while. I went back to sleep.

I woke up some time later. My brother was still sound asleep beside me. I had to pee, so as quietly as I could, I climbed out of the car and shut the door. I shivered a little in my pajamas and coat.

The sky was beginning to lighten. I could make out the shapes of trees and in the distance, the glittering ocean.

There were some low bushes nearby. I dashed over to them, squatted and relieved myself.

When I had finished, I wandered around a bit. The station wagon was parked off the side of the road, just above a short rocky drop to the beach. I carefully climbed down, hoping to find a sand dollar or a shiny piece of sea glass on the muddy flat.

My search turned up nothing more than a handful of periwinkle shells. After a few minutes, I decided it was too cold to continue, and climbed back up to the road. As I reached the top, I heard a great noise rise behind me. I lifted my face to see a tremendous flock of gulls, spreading across the sky from their roosts on the nearby bluffs. I watched them pass overhead, then I dropped my eyes and saw that sight that I wish so much to share.

The sun had broken the horizon. Bands of amber and rose light stretched along the bottom of the sky. Silhouetted by the light, a figure was walking slowly toward me.

I watched as my mother, waders to her hips, trudged back from the flats, leaning slightly to one side with the weight of her full bucket. Her hoe and headlamp dangled from her other hand.

She stopped, and only years later did I realize that she must have been looking back at me.

Her shoulders were slumped with fatigue, but her long hair rippled in the sea breeze like fine silk ribbons. The dawn's light sparkled through its locks and they looked as if they were braided with diamonds. For just that moment, it framed her in a golden nimbus.

A second or two later, she resumed her weary walk and the effect of the light was gone.

In that brief moment, I believe that I saw not her physical form, but her soul. She was not just a woman at her labors, but the goddess who had given me life and sustained it. My nurturer. My protectress.

In the years since, that vision has never left me, and perhaps in memory it has grown more beautiful, more magical than the reality. I don't think so. I think the contrary is true. The beauty I saw in my mother was beyond any ability I have to convey in words.

I wish I could paint. Then I might be able to show it to you.