Editor’s Note: “Letter From …” is a monthly column written by a Mainer, or person with ties to the state. Robin Griffiths and her family lived in North Sullivan and East Franklin from 1974 to 1983. The Griffiths since have made their home on the far-flung island of Burray in Scotland’s northern Orkney Isles.

We are having a wonderful time on the island of Stronsay in Orkney. Our digs are idyllic. Picture a white cottage set on the brink of a crescent of bright sand. The only thing betwixt ourselves and the beach, a slender rind of grass and oxeye daises. At high tide, a colony of seals reclines above the reach of waves relaxing like a portly family lounging after a picnic sunning and sleeping while the little ones tumble in the froth.

The young seals are an even slate-gray, almost black, while their elders are a motley bunch: variations of salt-and-pepper and fawn. They are conscious that we watch but, so long as we stay “hidden” in the verge, are not quick to relinquish the pleasures of basking. At the slightest noise, they turn their sweet, round bewhiskered faces our way, but soon relax and are asleep again, sometimes dreaming – jerking like a dog who chases rabbits over the hills of Nodd. One even claps his flippers as he snoozes on his back.

The juveniles are comical with relentless games. Yesterday I watched one playing “flotsam” for an hour or more. He positioned himself broadside where the surf broke upon the beach. The object appeared to lie as dead, letting himself be pushed forward with the incoming swell, then rolled down the gentle incline as the water receded, sucking him away with it. Head thrown back, he tossed his upper-most flipper skyward in gay abandon as he tumbled over and over in pinwheel fashion to meet the next incoming wave.

At first I thought he was ill and too weak to haul himself to safety. But then he popped to life and dove headlong, leaping like a salmon across the bay only to return a minute later to resume the game. Having seen seals posing on rocks or bobbling offshore as one is beachcombing, I thought I knew all about them yet, in all the years we’ve lived in Orkney, I have never been privileged to observe a colony in this unselfconscious state. It is really special.