Indistinguishable Summers

These past two weeks at the beach will melt in to other weeks in the very same place. Other vacations on that stretch of sandbar. They won't loudly pronounce themselves and stand separate from years of memories. They were sweet and quiet and likely forgettable.

It's hard to tease apart the years. To remember the precise differences between Arlo being two and Arlo being three. To remember what the years of just having three children, or just having two.  So little stands out in our days marked by a routine unknown at home. Slow mornings with trips to the coffee shop. A standing twelve o'clock date with our friends on Airport Beach. Snacks pulled from backseats and coolers when the whistle blows.

And when we get home, we make ourselves a drink as kids take turns in the outside showers. The cabinets are scavenged for nuts or crackers. And we make a half-hearted attempt to clean out the beach cars. Big kids make circles around the village on bikes. We make dinner plans with varying degrees of enthusiasm.  We take walks to explore old graveyards, to get scoops of ice cream. We all pile into the living room to watch cable tv, read books, fight slow internet and braid hair.

Next year will feel the same as last year, though Alamae will hopefully be slightly less demanding in trips to come. Soon enough, Sena and Gus will peel off. Staying behind, limiting how often they will be seen in public with their parents. And Arlo will miss them nearly as much as I will.

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Vacation, One Week In

The ocean is, arguably, my very favorite place. Every time I visit her shores, I wax euphoric. This visit, I will do my best to spare you, but rest assured, my love for her remains. 

And while the first week was marked by  all consuming, albeit minor, adversities, Tom arrived late last night, and so now at least I have help dealing with the most challenging aspect of the past seven days: a very beautiful, but completely demanding 17 month old baby. 

My sunburnt lips are still trashed, and a wisdom tooth I should have pulled a decade ago is still bothering me. But the salt water, the drip castles. The cups of almost instantly melted ice cream. The morning walks down dirt roads canopied by live oaks dripping in Spanish moss. Those things are happening too.

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Living Among Ghosts

What it must be like to pass by the bones of your ancestors, day in and day out, on the way to the grocery store, late at night after an evening drinking. Buried on the family plot next to the cottage that has weathered storms and sadness, built by the hands of your grandfather. There is no denying your mortality. Your last name will live on in this place, but you will return to the earth just like those who came before you.

The people there hold on to their accents, a brogue as knobby as the live oak trees that shade the graves of their forefathers. Everything that has withstood is weathered. The beauty is is not bright. It is the hidden sort, found on lichen covered fences. Discovered on deeply lined faces not so quick to smile.

As a child, we would visit. Take the ferry for a day. My mom would drag us down small streets to peer at the headstones and build stories around skeletal facts. A name. A birth date. The year of death. Mothers who lost child after child. Families gone the span of twelve months.

We were children. We did not want to think of death. The roads were hot and the mosquitos plentiful. We wanted to walk on to the lone toy shop. We wanted someone to buy us an ice cream. When the chorus of complaining children reached its crescendo, my mom would finally walk on, but she always looked back. She knew things I did not yet know. She felt things I wouldn't feel for years.

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