My older sister invites me to come stay at a house on the beach to celebrate her 50th birthday. I rent a Ford Escape that has Bluetooth and satellite radio and cruise control, pack up my two kids, a suitcase and a cooler, kiss my husband goodbye and head for North Carolina. We stop too many times for too many potty breaks, get too deep into the country to find...
A shaggy-haired guy with a toothbrush in one hand and an empty plastic gallon-sized milk bottle in the other approaches me as I walk down Stark Street and asks if I know where he can find some water. I tell him I have no idea, and he gives me a smile and thanks me and keeps walking. At Pioneer Square a man with a blue face leans against a bike...
We managed to slip out of town to the beach house and have enjoyed a few warm and sunny days, but now a cold front is rolling on in. At the ready are Playmobil sets, plastic Civil War soldiers, vintage Hardy Boys hardcovers, two decks of playing cards, and a variety of other wet weather beach house staples. I have good chocolate and a good book on hand, and am...
I’m headed to Portland today. I’m listening to jazz on satellite radio, looking out the window at the canyons colored with dawn and just feeling so in awe of creation. A dirt road carved into the deep red earth below folds into a sharp angle, looping around a little town as an afterthought.
When we are here there is no hurrying and no herding and no lunch-packing, no prying small hands off of my body, no pushes toward the school door, no blue eyes full of longing to be home. We walk along the bay bottom at low tide and dig, and we poke at slimy things with long sticks. We pick up the hermit crabs, and we talk about how we love...
John’s late grandmother would sit here in her Jordache cut-offs and read in the evenings, her feet propped up on the ottoman and a glass of watered-down wine beside her. At low tide, a warm breeze would come to her through the sliding glass door, smelling of muck and mussels and ruffling the pages of her book.
We weren’t really lost; we could see the house just across the cove. But the fields were so very cold and muddy, and the winds came off the water and whipped stinging sand at our eyes and mouths, making the evening seem desperate and epic. And so our thoughts and conversation turned to fire and food and warmth and shelter. The Muscari pushed toward the sunset, unfeeling, insensitive to our...
I found it at the edge of the Atlantic, lifeless, grey, sliding in the foam. The pain of the frigid waters shot up my legs as I darted in to pluck the ocean’s dead from her shallows. The white last now sits on my window sill, the trophy of a landlocked housewife.
As I watched this day end I somehow knew that I was really watching the end of a season. When we left the next morning, the air had turned much colder. The leaves that lined the turnpike with fire on our way down turned brown and curled in the wake of our speeding northbound minivan.
I want to need to remember: :: a pod of dolphins hunting for their breakfast in the waters across the cove :: the smell of laundry that has dried in the salty bay air :: laughing and carrying on with old friends over wine and clams casino :: a funky haircut that heralds a new season in my life :: rounded triangles of moonlight reflected off the backs of thousands...