The Summer the Sea Remembered

The Summer the Sea Remembered

by Rosie Scholz

"Some songs don’t end — they echo. Through bloodlines, sea winds, and half-remembered dreams."

— R.S.

This story drifts between memory and myth. It carries the quiet inheritance of my mother’s Swedish roots — her belief in unseen presences, in the old country magic of hush and hum — and blends it with the ancestral spirit of Aotearoa, the land of the long white cloud. Here, Māori legends breathe through every river, mountain, and shoreline. The story is set at Pouawa, a coastal spot just north of Gisborne on Te Tairāwhiti — the East Coast of New Zealand, where the light first touches the world each day. At Pouawa, it was as though these two worlds met — in silence, in mist, in song.

That summer, it was just us — our family, the Bach, and the storm.

The Bach perched above the Pouawa lagoon, just north of Gisborne on the East Coast. Its timber was silvered by sea winds and softened by time. It creaked even when the air was still as if murmuring its memories. The calm that day felt uneasy — a hush laid over everything, the white sky stretched tight, the sea holding its breath.

Dad said it was just humidity. He was solemn and steady, a no-nonsense kind of man, moving through the day like an anchor. His silence carried weight, but not unkindness — more like an understanding of things he didn’t speak about.

Mum hung out the tea towels on the line, her eyes narrowed toward the hills. She had the grace of someone not fully tethered to this world. There was something in her movements, her quiet humming — a song half-remembered from another life. Her Swedish roots whispered through her, and I always believed she had sewn magic into the seams of the clothes she made so perfectly. Mum had always said that in Sweden, Midsummer night was when the old stories stirred — when you could dream of your true love, or hear the forest sigh. She’d hum sometimes at twilight like she was coaxing something to rise from the air itself.

I lay in the old wooden daybed, pushed into the corner. The paint was chipped, the mattress dipped, and it smelt of damp wool and old sea salt. Dust floated in the slant of light, drifting like tiny spirits. Outside, the tide crept lazily toward the creek mouth. Nothing moved. Not even the gulls.

That day had been golden and long.

We swam in the lagoon, toes sinking into the mudstone, the water warm as breath.

Crayfish bubbled in a kerosene tin on the sand, their tails flicking in protest.

Waveney, verging on adulthood, wandered toward the far end of Pouawa — blonde hair bouncing, kind eyes scanning the dunes. She looked like she belonged to a sunnier world, the kind older girls stepped into when they left their childhoods behind.

Dad and Tim Somerville came back with pāua and slick wetsuits. The net of fish hung between them like treasure.

Michael, thoughtful and artistic, trailed behind them with a sketchpad tucked under one arm, teasing me gently, as he always did, but always noticing more than he said.

Soren, nine and bursting with imagination, ran ahead in loops and zigzags, conjuring battles and treasures from the dunes — part boy, part wild explorer.

The old tyre raft bobbed in the cove, heavy with the sea’s offering.

The night the storm came, the world paused.

A breath of silence. A long sigh.

The sky hung low and silver, heavy with waiting. The sea had drawn back from the shore as if hiding something beneath its skin. My family slept — soft shapes tucked under blankets, quiet as stones. I lay alone in the daybed, still as driftwood, watching a line of light shiver across the wall.

The Bach creaked, gently, like an old breath in and out.

Something shifted.

It began not with a bang, but a breath — a presence brushing the edge of silence.

Soft at first — a breath, a thread, a murmur.

Not from outside.

From within.

A sound came through the walls.

It was mournful — not music, not voice, but something in between. A keening, the kind that seeps into bone. A cry that sounded both near and impossibly far, as if it travelled across generations.

It rose and fell like the tide, catching on the edges of sorrow. It sobbed. Not loudly, but deeply — the kind of crying that is done alone, by someone who has cried before and will again.

Then came the shriek.

Sudden. Splintered. A cry sharp enough to split the night open.

I sat bolt upright, heart pounding.

No one else stirred.

And then — through the window — I saw it.

White mist.

Not drifting — dancing.

It moved slowly, rising, curling, folding in on itself. As if it were being pulled by music I couldn’t hear. As if the land had begun to remember.

It circled once, twice. Lifted. Fell. Turned again.

Earlier that week, we’d walked past the little red cabin tucked into the cliffs.

It sat like a secret in the mudstone, half-swallowed by bush.

Jeremy had told me about the old man who lived there — long grey beard, long yellow nails.

I’d imagined him watching from the shadows, waiting. After the storm, when the wind had died and the beach lay hollow, I thought I saw grey hair swirling in the mist near the rocks — like smoke or memory.

I watched, frozen, the blanket pulled to my face, the smell of crayfish still clinging to my hand, fingers wrapped tight around my doll.

I didn’t understand it then. But now, looking back, I believe I witnessed something more — something remembered by the land and offered to a child who still believed in magic.

By morning, the wind had slipped away. The beach lay rinsed and hollow.

We followed Dad down the slope, still in our pyjamas, the sand cold and clinging to our ankles. There — tangled in kelp, wedged against the rocks — were planks of faded blue timber, mottled with barnacles and seaweed. Bits of an old weathered boat, tossed up by the tide like puzzle pieces from another time. It felt like treasure.

Further along, near the creek mouth, a green glass buoy sat wedged in tight among the rocks. Its briny rope was still wrapped around it, encrusted with salt. It glinted softly, catching the low morning light. Dad picked it up carefully and carried it back, setting it down beside the Bach, where it stood sentinel for years — a watchful green eye beside the steps.

Further still, between two rocks, sat a Waka.

Long. Silent. Carved with patterns too faint to name.

No footprints. No anchor rope. Just there, as if left by time or tide or something older still.

Out beyond the breakers, a whale surfaced — slow, deliberate.

Its back arched, glistening. Watching.

I remembered the stories.

Of the boy Paikea, who called to the sea when his canoe sank, and was carried to safety on the back of a whale.

Maybe this was a rescue too.

Maybe the whale had answered again.

We never spoke of it.

Mum made tea.

Dad tuned the radio.

The sand covered what it could.

But something was different.

Later that day, I remember raised voices. Tim Somerville had come to the Bach again — something between him and Dad boiled over. I don’t know what it was about — maybe the storm, maybe the sea, maybe something older and harder to name. But I remember the sharpness in their voices, the heavy silence that followed, and the way Mum’s hands moved quickly as she cleared the mugs.

Jeremy said later there had been a punch thrown. I only remember the thud — like a log dropped hard on the deck — and the way no one looked each other in the eye afterwards.

We packed up not long after.

That was the last summer we stayed at the Bach at Pouawa.

But the song stayed with me —

that sorrowful sound that drifted through the walls,

folded itself into my sleep,

and never quite left.

All I know is that one night at Pouawa,

something came.

And it sang to a girl in a daybed —

and she carried it, quietly, into every tide that followed.

With respect to the stories and whenua of the East Coast iwi. This story references traditional Māori folklore, including the Patupaiarehe (fairy people) and the enduring presence of waiata as a vessel of memory and spirit. The land holds memories of colonial disruption — the severing of connections between tangata whenua and their ancestral places, the loss of mana and cultural practices. These deeper wounds may echo through the spiritual unrest that visits the shore. In the hush that followed the storm, a grieving land seemed to reach out — mourning what was taken, and what still lingers beneath the tide. The girl's memory, steeped in her mother’s Swedish folklore and the echoes of Midsummer dreamings, became the vessel for these layered losses — and perhaps, a bridge between worlds.