Mindy Meyers-Halleck

Echoes of Bygone Years

Posted on July 11, 2026 Updated on July 11, 2026

“The best journey takes you home.” — Unknown.

My bygone years rise in memory like sea mist. They carry the ache of knowing that the place I once burned to escape was quietly shaping the naïve soul I hastily ferried away.

And now that sea mist transports sounds and smells, taunting my return; the underpinning of honied seaweed on salty air, fish and chips, the smokey aroma of bonfires along the beach, someone strumming an old acoustic guitar by a fire pit––flames crackling and popping like dancing red pyrotechnics against the midnight sky. Home.

My brother, who owned that old guitar once, said to me as he strummed, “Sis, you’re a mermaid, or one of those Irish silkie things gramma talked about.” It was the greatest insight he ever offered me, and the only time I felt he saw my true spirit. That night, he tried to make up a song about mermaids. It was awful. We ended up laughing so hard we rolled over on our backs by the fire, watched falling stars, and listened to the silence.

These days, I think of myself as a mermaid left ashore too long, just as my brother once said. I need the ocean: sand beneath my bare feet and betwixt my toes, the squawks, screeches, and mewing sounds of scavenging seagulls, and blue-gray water near enough to breathe. I like to think he knew that need because he was Merfolk too. Maybe that’s why this world hurt him so much; perhaps he belonged to another. I love this life, but, like him, I love it best from the beach, the watery world that shaped me.

I’ll be returning home soon. I look forward to tending my family’s coastal graves and meeting the ghost of my younger self––a mermaid who longs to return to the sea. And though my brother is gone now, it is his strumming guitar I will hear in the echoes of our bygone years.