Free Sea Air by Jule Meeringa

feeling a little homesick, is that it?” Harm handed the letter back without reading it. “Your Momma really misses you, I’ll bet.”
    “No! I mean, of course she misses us. But it’s not that. Uwe and I don’t want to go back. We want to stay here now. Father could be the lighthouse keeper. Why doesn’t he want to do that? We could all be together . . .” Mathis covered his face in his hands as the tears came.
    “You know what really helps me when I’m sad?”
    The boys looked at Harm as he pulled a harmonica out of his pocket and began to play a happy sailor song.
    He stopped. “Do you want to try?”
    “Can we really?” Uwe forgot his sadness for the moment.
    Mathis stared at the shiny instrument. Harm put the harmonica in his hand and Mathis touched it carefully with one finger, as if it were a fragile treasure. After an encouraging nod from Harm, he pressed it slowly to his lips and blew into it, gently at first and then a little stronger.
    Uwe covered his ears. “Let me! I can do it better!” He grabbed the harmonica out of Mathis’s hands and blew into it himself.
    “Well, that isn’t the prettiest sound I’ve heard come out of a harmonica, but it might be the loudest.” Harm laughed. “Bring it to the beach and I’ll show you how to play it properly.”
    He didn’t have to ask twice. The boys’ sadness was forgotten. If they were going to be real sailors, they had to learn to play the harmonica!
    Harm was a good and patient teacher. By that evening, Mathis and Uwe could each play a short melody. Proudly, they sauntered back to the children’s home. Harm had promised them that he would teach them a little bit more every day, and by the time the day of departure arrived, each of them could—with just a few off notes here and there—play “Wir lagen vor Madagaskar.”
    The end of the holiday was inevitable, and the time came for the children to return home. The farewell to the North Sea, and especially to their friend Harm Voss, was so difficult that even Harm’s kind words could not comfort them and they couldn’t keep themselves from crying. At the train platform, they clung so tightly to Harm that he had no choice but to push them gently into their compartment.
    “Come back and visit now, you two. I’ll want to see if you really practiced the harmonica.”
    Mathis sobbed loudly. “But we don’t even have a harmonica!”
    “You do now.” Harm held up his own instrument. “This one.”
    As the train pulled out of the station, Mathis clutched the harmonica so tightly his knuckles turned white. Harm stood on the platform and waved, and they watched him until the train took the first curve. Then he was gone.
    Mathis had never felt so lost. He hunched down in his seat and didn’t speak during the whole journey home . I will come back and become a sailor, he vowed over and over again as the train took him away from the place he’d come to love. And indeed, the love he and Uwe had discovered for the North Sea would never leave them.

O h my God, it had happened again. I looked in dismay at the novel in my hands, then dropped it on the floor. I had read yet another chapter without registering a word. I knew what my problem was: I was alone after spending five beautiful days with Mathis, taking long bike rides and endless walks on the beach, exploring local restaurants. We had talked not just about ourselves, but also about larger things like God and the world. I still knew little about Mathis’s present life. He didn’t seem to want to talk about it.
    Even the most boring shows on TV had failed to put me to sleep the night before. It already felt like this would be the longest day of my life. Today I wouldn’t see Mathis. He said last night that he had to take care of his boat today. Even worse, we’d made no further plans, and I didn’t even know if I would see him again. He said nothing about it and I was too afraid to ask. I was calling myself every name in the book now as