On Vacation

Do you have a place in your memory, a place exemplifying the best of your childhood summers? So that when you think of that place, you see it in sepia or technicolor, depending on the memory or your mood? A place so entrenched as a part of you that a warm salty breeze or rain pounding on the roof or crickets in the cool night conjure a brief flash of the place?





We've been spending time at that place of mine--which isn't my place in real life, it's my parents' place, and my grandparents' before that; where my mother grew up with her sister and brother and best friend, and I grew up with my sisters and cousins, and now my kids and my nieces and cousins are doing the same. Where the grownups hang out on the porch long after dark and the usual bedtime hours, chatting and laughing; and the kids hang out in bed laughing and scheming. Where the neighbors are the same families as four generations ago, and the few new families are a good source of gossip and a good object of spying (depending on your age, of course.)



Here's where the kids get a real taste of freedom and self-responsibility. It's where you'll see your first shooting star, and where the milky way looks like a milky way. This is where you're brave enough to put your feet down even though that kid just pulled up a gigantic pinchy crab, and where you're brave enough to swim over to a jelly fish and capture it in a bucket. It's where you get your swim endurance and finally swim to the buoy; and where you get your land endurance and make it to the mile store for breakfast or candy or ice cream, depending on the time of day. On your way there, you'll screech when you see the bridge, and on the way home, you'll cry with your heart broken.



I love this place, with the rambling old cottage and the log at the end of the street at the beach, and that's where I've been spending my free time.





No blogging, nothing all that modern. So I'm back. I guess I'm back.


But there's still some summer left. I imagine that there always will be.