Chicken Soup for the Beach Lover's Soul (17 page)

“How about Dollywood, Tennessee?” I said, laughing. It was as good a place as any at that point. Nothing seemed to click. I had a good idea where I'd like to get married, but didn't think Andrew would go for it.

The next morning the winter sun was strong and woke me far earlier than I had intended on a Sunday. From the den, I heard the almost silent sound of keys tapping.

“Have you ever heard of Seal Island?” he asked as I entered the den.

“Nope,” I said, sliding into the computer chair.

“Well, you'll be there by December eighteenth.”

That was in three days. What was he talking about?

Seal Island, I learned, was a little wisp of an island off the coast of Wells, Maine. Somehow he stumbled across it on the Internet, and he had already rented a cottage for us directly on the beach.

“Honey, you have never wanted to go near the ocean,” I said. “What are you thinking?”

“That I love you,” he said, kissing my nose. “Go get packed.”

Two days later, I bought a dress off the rack, picked up two wedding rings, and let my parents know we'd be arriving. Long since divorced, both lived close to where we vacationed as a family. I suppose that it held good memories for all of us. Andrew and I boarded the flight from North Carolina to cold, snowy Maine just in time for our December twentieth wedding. My mother picked us up at the airport, and I noticed Andrew sniffing the air with some interest, like a dog catching a whiff of steak on the grill.

“What's that smell?” he asked.

“Salt air! Isn't it great?” I said, excited to be back in Maine.

He shrugged his shoulders unconvinced, but kissed my mother and off we went to find the cottage. I admit I was nervous. In our relationship I did all of the planning, and for good reason. My husband's idea of a romantic date was combing through the DVD section of a discount store and grabbing a sandwich at a fast-food place.

We pulled into the driveway of a small house in Wells. The cottage was white, and though not directly on the sand, was seated on a low cliff. Salty, misty air enveloped the house. Inside, the owners had decorated a Christmas tree, and it stood majestically in the center of a picture window that looked out onto the winter sea. Standing by the window, I squinted through my bad eyes and asked what was moving out on the water.

“Seals,” Andrew said excitedly, wrapping his arms around my waist. “That must be Seal Island!”

We stood together and watched seals dive and swim, then climb back onto the small island to huddle together. But we had to move along—we had a wedding to prepare for the following afternoon.

We awoke the next morning to a sight to behold. The sea was stormy, with waves crashing against the rocks. Seagulls swooped overhead, their cries reminding me of those special summers as a child. A few hours later, we took our vows standing by the picture window. I wore a simple cream-colored dress, and my husband wore informal trousers and a shirt, set off by a royal blue tie with tiny snowflakes. The white cake was covered with red frosted roses, and sugar-encrusted snowflakes surrounded the base. A few family members took us to a quaint restaurant down the road, where we had our first meal as husband and wife. At the end of dinner, everyone left, leaving my new husband and me in our cottage by the sea. It was late afternoon, and snow started sifting from the sky. Thinking Andrew would be ready for a nap, I went to change into comfortable clothes. He followed me into the bedroom and took me by the hand, leading me to the front door of the cottage. “Wait here,” he said, returning a moment later to hand me my small bridal bouquet of red roses. My husband led me outdoors down a winding rustic path to the ocean. I was in my wedding dress and heels still.
Was he
crazy?

Reading my thoughts, he picked me up and carried me over the rocks to where a small patch of sand waited, not yet filled with snow. I watched him as he took off his nice shoes, and then his socks. “Andrew, it's snowing. . . . It's freezing,” I said. “What are you doing?”

“I never thought I would want to put my feet in the ocean,” he said, “much less in twenty-degree weather, but this is no ordinary day.”

And there in front of me was my new husband. Six-feet-four inches, his pants rolled up to his calves, laughing like a child and splashing in the sea. The seals were still cavorting on their island, and it felt like the world was celebrating with us. I tossed my bouquet into the water, imagining all of the memories to come.

Heather Cook Lindsay

“It's the ocean—for you.”

Reprinted by permission of Patrick Hardin.
©
1995 Patrick Hardin.

Time and Tides

M
emory is a way of holding onto the things you
love, the things you are, the things you never
want to lose.

From the television show
The Wonder Years

Today my eyes blur with tears as I look at the photographs of my toddler grandchildren on a special Cape Cod beach last summer. Kira, wearing a large green sunbonnet pushed back by the breeze, waves a shovel in one hand and carries her pail in the other, while Luke, water lapping over his toes, studiously sorts shells and stones. Michele, the proud mom, soaks in the sun and the moment from a blanket nearby, while out in the bay, Dana, my younger daughter, sails her beloved Bonito racing skiff, red and white sail tilted, heeling against the wind.

I know I am not seeing clearly.
Isn't this really a picture of
Michele and Dana at the ages of Luke and Kira, shoveling and
splashing on this same beach? Am I not the woman sitting on that
same blanket with my husband, savoring that special sense of coming
home that children have with the beach?

Back in the sixties, when we first went to Eastham, our old black and white Plymouth was just big enough to hold the requisite suitcases, books, pails, shovels, inflatable tubes, teddy bears, groceries, sheets, and towels that we would need for a week in a small rental cottage at the cape. Minutes after we arrived that first summer, we lost sight of Dana while we were unloading the car after our long six-hour trip from New York. Like a homing pigeon, she instinctively headed toward that beach on the bay, and she has returned each summer since. Now I'm the only one in the family who has never gone back.

There was no television in that small rental cottage. Instead, each morning the beach helped us create a new story for that day. Is the tide in or out? What time can we swim? Are the clouds and the wind saying we can sail this afternoon? When it's low tide, can we walk out to the old target ship far out on the bay? If it's raining, can we go to the Visitor Center at the National Seashore? Or can we just read and play Monopoly in our small cottage? Time at the beach took on a new dimension. Clocks were irrelevant. Instead, the tides, the sunsets, and the sunrises guided the rhythm of our days.

As we returned each year to that same cottage, the beach brought returning friends for the children as well. Encyclopedia Brown, as they named him, was a thin, wiry, bespectacled little boy, who each morning excitedly told us about his daily discovery of a sand shark or a horseshoe crab, or sadly, one day, some pilot whales that stranded themselves on our beach. Tall and quiet Walter from Massachusetts came regularly to our blanket with a deck of cards in hand and waited for Michele to come in from her swim so they could play several rounds of Michigan Rummy. Susan from Connecticut was a lively companion for Dana as they swam off the dock or raced their sailboats toward the horizon.

Some evenings meant a bonfire on the beach; other evenings meant early bedtime after a full day of sun and sand and a wonderful, fresh clam chowder dinner. At least one night during our vacation we had an inhibition-shattering, succulent lobster dinner, served on oil cloth–covered tables at the Lobster Hutt in Wellfleet. Afterward we washed butter-soaked hands in conveniently placed sinks in each corner of the room and headed to Orleans for enormous hot fudge sundaes at Dairy Queen.

But by far the best dessert was the rich bay sunset that the beach offered us at night. At dusk the blanket became our vantage point for the dazzling gold, orange, and purple light show that illuminated the entire sky and subtly changed hues each second of the sun's deliberate descent. It was as if the sky dressed itself in royal robes to bear witness to the ritual leave-taking of its majestic ruler, and those of us who were privileged to watch became silent in awe and wonder.

Somewhere during the seventies, we needed my Volkswagen Bug and the big old Oldsmobile known as the Queen Elizabeth to get bikes, the Bonito, guitars, and two teenage girls from New York to Cape Cod. But we didn't miss a summer. Encyclopedia Brown and Walter were still there, only now they talked of college plans, Genesis, and Led Zeppelin. One year Walter invited Michele to his senior prom, and she accepted. The Vietnam War came and went, Elvis died, and Nixon resigned. But we still searched for the perfect shell, walked the mud flats to infinity, and savored the delightfully messy lobster dinner in Wellfleet. And we still raced to get to our blanket in time for the sunsets. The beach was our anchor.

By 1980 we built our own house in Eastham, within walking distance of the same beach. My husband and I dreamed of our children and grandchildren visiting us there in our retirement. Who wouldn't want to come to Cape Cod in the summer, no matter where they lived the rest of the year?

The year 1984 was the last summer I spent on the cape. I loved the house I had helped design, and I loved the web of memories of my children that we wove for all those years at that special beach. But my marriage was over, and in the division of spoils known as divorce, my husband got the cape house while I stayed in New York.

Today, I live in Colorado. My daughters live in the West and Northwest, but they still return to Eastham each summer. Now, as I look at these pictures, I see clearly that it is my grandchildren frolicking on the beach I knew so well. My heart aches, but I know that even though the tides of our lives go in and out, the beach and our family will remain.

Dee Montalbano

Timeless Sea

I plop right down in the ocean-soaked sand, just far enough from the incoming tide, and begin digging. I use my hands, never a shovel, letting the fine wet grains stuff themselves behind my fingernails. I won't go as far as China today. I'll scoop just enough to make a castle. It all depends on how close I am to the surf. I dig and dig and dig until the underground flow suddenly appears and fills up the hole I created. Magic!

At forty-two, this is all a mystery to me. How does the water come to fill the hole from below? If it's always there, why don't I see it until I dig? How does liquid hold its form beneath solid ground?

I'm sure there are simple, widely known answers to these questions, but I don't want to know; I've enjoyed a lifetime ofwonder. Oncemy pool fills, I set to work, letting the soupy sand trickle from my hand onto the pile of hard earth. Trickle, trickle, trickle . . . my castle grows, taller and taller, until it is time to fashion a tower—a careful drip, drip, drip as the tiny drops of soup harden into chips, creating a delicate spire.

I am reminded of a castle in France built ages ago upon craggy rock, the sea rushing to surround it with the tide. I, too, am a creator, artist, architect, building a cathedral. I, too, have spent a lifetime at this holy task, like the children before me, and so too the ones after me—after I myself am washed away from the shore of this world. Bridges, moats, and castle walls, all crafted by loving hands, until the tide retrieves them, and we begin again.

It is the summer of 1963, of 1981, of 2006. Time is no matter. The salt still sprays in the air, coating the downy hairs of my face. The gulls still swoop overhead; the pipers run to and fro in the surf. The sky is blue or gray or white; the water is warm, seaweed filled; or cold, bringing clamshells to the shore.

My feet are sprinkled with sand—the tiniest specks of gray, black, and white. In the heat of noontime sun, my step quickens, becoming staccato as I dash through the soft, dry mounds of the dunes before they scorch my soles. I am heading toward my car, or toward the music of the ice cream truck, or toward cousins arriving to join us for the afternoon. . . .

My grandmother has packed us peanut butter crackers and lemonade; later, she'll surprise us with root beer barrels and sour balls. I'll watch her mouth pucker, creating hollows beneath her cheekbones as she studies the crossword puzzle with a sharpened pencil behind her ear.