Big like the ocean

She sat still, watching the waves.  She watched them roll in, peak in crowns of white foam and fling themselves at the lagoon’s pebbly beach.  And, having made their point, roll silently out again.  She sat watching them come in an endless progression, never growing weary of it, as she did every day.  All day she watched them, reading their messages.  And while she did, no thoughts of her home and family beyond the fringe of palm trees at the lagoon’s inlet intruded.
They didn’t understand.  They couldn’t understand…and, of course, she didn’t expect them to.  To them and the world they inhabited, she appeared a hopeless dreamer, but there was a core of pragmatism to her whose existence none of them could see.  It was just a fact of life that she could perceive a lot of things that they couldn’t.

It is said that people who live beside the ocean cannot appreciate it, and this held true for most of the Rodgrigues’, too.
All but for their daughter Clarissa, whose fascination with the eternal waves and surf seemed almost unseemly to the poor fisherman’s family.  The ocean was the source of their existence and sustenance – Pedro Rodrigues, his wife and their other two daughters had never seen any reason to consider it as anything else.  Yes, they knew that it had claimed Domingo, Clarissa’s beloved, a year ago.  Claimed him on the very night of their wedding.  He had set out in his weathered fishing boat before the crack of dawn, despite Pedro’s pointed warnings of the coming storm.  In the most florid bloom of youth, Domingo had considered himself invincible to the furies of nature; it had cost him and two hired hands from the village their lives.