Cordelia

Cordelia was almost four. She lived with her parents and little brother on a small farm at the base of the Smokey Mountains in Tennessee. She had never been on vacation, had only been to the mountains once. She knew they weren’t “rich.” Being rich meant you could go places and didn’t have to work all the time like her parents did; it meant having new clothes and toys and eating steak when you didn’t just butcher a cow.

Since Cordie could remember, she had heard a sound on the wind. It was like a constant rushing, a restless push and pull. When she watched a movie and saw the ocean for the first time, she heard that same sound and realized she had been hearing ocean waves coming into the shore all this time, the push of the waves against the sand and the ocean pulling the waves back into herself again. At first, she thought there must be a ocean nearby, and she asked Mother to take her to it. Mother had laughed, but soon realized that Cordie was serious. When Mother found out that Cordie heard the restless waves on the wind, she became concerned. She brought out a very old atlas with a map of the whole country. She showed Cordie where they were and where the ocean was. Cordie just said that she wondered how the waves could be so loud that she could hear them in Tennessee.

Mother was tucking her in one night when she asked if Cordie wanted to hear a story about Mother’s life before Cordie was born. She quickly answered yes. Mother said that when she and Father first got married, they lived by the sea. Cordie sat up in her excitement, but Mother made her lay back down again. Then Mother told her the story.

“We lived in a tiny house that we could barely afford, but we didn’t care. We could hear the ocean’s waves at night as we fell asleep and every day that we could manage it, we would spend at the beach. I got pregnant, and you were growing inside me, as restless as the waves, rolling and pushing. When my tummy got big and the day for you to be born drew near, I would walk along the shore, dreaming what you would be like, dreaming about giving you a life of happiness. One day, a woman came up to me when I was walking alone by the sea. She was old, but her face glowed, almost like the moon. She told me that I would have a baby girl, and I should name her ‘Cordelia’ which means daughter of the sea. She told me your heart would always belong to the ocean, and that one day you would save the ocean for us all. I thought she was crazy, and I was a little afraid because she seemed so sure of what she was saying and it was all so strange. But now that I know that you hear the waves, and I see the look in your eyes sometimes – your deep blue eyes, as blue as the sea – looking far away, your heart miles away by the sea, and I wonder. I wonder what it all means, Cordelia.” Mother looked at the little girl, who had fallen asleep and whose blue eyes were closed in slumber, dreaming sweet dreams of ocean waves in the sea as old as creation, the sound of sea gulls crying, and sunlight dancing on the water like a million diamonds tossed out by the hand of God.

Image credit; Eirik Olsen @ Unsplash

Image credit; Pan Xiaozhen @ Unsplash

Copyright ©2026 Lisa Paul. All rights reserved.

What do you see #322- 5th January 2026