“Existence in the present gives island living an extreme vividness and purity. One lives like a child or a saint in the immediacy of here and now.” — Anne Morrow Lindbergh, Gift From The Sea

Every year I’m drawn into the rhythm of our summer rental. A time to arrive. A time to go for our first walk, drink my first cup of coffee, see our first view. A time to check out, take one last look, wave our final goodbye. Until next year. An exciting start, a somber finish, always.

In between we rush inside, away from thunderstorms, bring the towels in, close the windows. Everything has a solution. We work on puzzles, play board games, read, hug, bathe, comb hair, drink wine at 4:00 in the afternoon, watch fireworks from our window, pile up shells, walk barefoot, pick wildflowers, bundle under towels and shirts on cool beach days, drink the hot sun on clear days, taste the salt water on our lips, slap mosquitoes. Everything is within our reach.

Quickly, quickly this summer is slipping away. We’re home from “our” cottage now (a cottage we definitely do not own), home from Maine. The countdown starts again. So I page through photos and finally look at the feathers that we mindlessly plucked from the sand and grass, really seeing them for the first time. I didn’t finish reading the books I normally would or arrange sand dollars and take pictures of them the way I always do. I decided to save certain tasks for our return, knowing I wouldn’t have time for them but also knowing that I would need them. I’d need them to remind me of the ebb and flow, of abundance and absence, of the inevitability of time and change.

Arrival

We usually arrive to a too hot cottage, curtains thrown wide by the housecleaners. But it doesn’t matter. The year, the longing, is finally over. The blast of heat welcome. We unload the bare minimum, swimsuits, a single beer, maybe a fan, and I send the kids to get ice. Then we walk the beach, regardless of the weather. Every time they tell me they don’t want to change into swimsuits, that they won’t go in the water. They’ve held off for more than three hundred days, it’s too much to bear to wait even a few more minutes. And, of course, they both return sopping from the waist down. Every time.

That afternoon is always full of relief and possibility. No need to panic over the weather, we have time for even the foggiest, rainiest beginnings to balance out. Thick stacks of postcards are optimistically bought. Surely three weeks is plenty of time to fill them out and have them arrive in mailboxes well before we return. All the clothes are clean, the groceries — dotted with impulse purchases — can barely be contained by our tiny kitchen and its few shelves. We buy tubs of ice cream, beach toys, and too many ingredients for meals that will go unmade. Everything in its place. The only clean slate we ever get.

And time unfolds. I wake early to write or walk the beach. Our day is a neat line between cottage and beach. Breakfast, beach. Lunch, beach. Beer, beach, dinner, and sometimes? A beach fire. It’s a level of simplicity I never achieve in regular life. There are no calls to cancel or start anything, no explanation of benefits to match up, no bills to be paid, no work to do or sell, no permission slips to sign, all the layers are stripped clean. I wonder why life can’t always be this simple, this elemental. But comparing your regular life to your vacation life is a fool’s errand.

The saddest mornings

Saturday mornings are inevitably somber, most of our neighbors preparing to check out. I wake and feel the heaviness, I walk to the deck and see them taking their last walk, having their last cup of coffee by the water, and sometimes taking their last early morning dip — something I always promise myself I’ll do on our last morning, but have never done.

As the checkout time of 10 a.m. draws near, kids sit on steps or help bring stray items to the family car. Parents efficiently (or frustratingly) put the puzzle of the trunk, the back of the car, the bed of the pickup, and in some cases, the trailer, back together. Beachballs are deflated, coolers emptied and stuffed with dirty beach towels. Even when we’re not the ones leaving, the quiet hangs over us like a fog, dampening everything. Even though it’s not our turn, I know that soon enough it will be.

Lunchtime is quiet, with just the crew of cleaning ladies moving door to door, punchy songs and car dealership commercials carried by the brisk ocean wind from their small radio to our windows. They efficiently remove all traces of the previous week — the dried butter teardrops from the last lobster dinner, the smudgy fingerprints on the windows, flattened flies, swirls of sand, tiny dunes in every corner. We eat our lunch quietly or leave to do laundry in a town a half hour away.

The ebb.

The happiest afternoons

Then the afternoon arrives. Despite the speed limit signs, cars don’t roll in slowly, they practically bounce. Barely in park, the doors fly open, bags and people spill out, everyone racing to the deck to see the beach this year. What’s changed, what’s stayed the same. Babies are toddlers now, toddlers are kids, teenagers are college students. Big extended families and constellations of friends shout to each other as each familiar car parks in its designated spot. New Jersey, Vermont, New York, New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Connecticut, Quebec, Ontario, hello, hello! We’re finally here! We made it!

Our kids are quick to grasp onto this, the promise of the next group. In these moments, in this familiar place, they thrive on the unknown. New friends could be out there, new games to be invented, new attendees for movie night in our cottage. How old are they? What toys did they bring? Possibility, possibility, possibility.

The flow.

I eye the new arrivals, knowing everyone has a story that can sometimes be seen, even if we never speak.

One year, a family of four arrived, the two kids just a bit older than ours. They all went for their first walk on the beach, the husband reached for his wife’s hand, she dropped his. They continued in silence as their kids raced ahead. The next year he arrived with the kids but without his wedding band.

The ebb.

The year after, he arrived with his kids and a different woman, a woman who looked happy, who spent time at the beach and not holed up in their cottage. This year they all arrived together again and I wonder how it’s going. The kids are now teenagers. The years pile up, the bonds that were broken, mend.

The flow.

Elderly couples who’ve come to this beach for forty years — the gentleman setting up their chairs each morning, helping his wife down to the beach, bringing her back up with a patient arm, retrieving the chairs — stopped coming last year. She is too frail.

The ebb.

We watch our kids grow and become more fearless, diving straight into towering waves and holding live lobsters. They agree that our simple breakfasts just taste better in Maine. And our early morning walks, lying directly onto the hot sand mid-day, and eating ice cream out of our tiny cottage bowls at night are all a person could ever need to feel happy.

The flow.

We witness from afar our neighbors age and give up this beach forever. When I was a teenager, I used to watch my grandparents from the dunes, walking the beach every morning and every evening. They’re gone now.

The ebb.

The return

As our time was drawing to a close this year, my kids expressed everything they missed about home — our cat, their bikes, the lake that’s like a swimming pool compared to the crushing waves they’ve been battling. I, too, started to glimpse the small comforts, a bigger bed, a real shower, good coffee. For them our trip is enough, they’re full and wrung out at the end, always sleeping at least half the way home. I usually leave feeling not just sad, but a crushing amount of dread. Over work, over all of the responsibilities that are about to come crashing down, over the money we just spent. I nurse my disappointments.

But no one wants to hear you complain about your three weeks at the beach. And it’s not complaining, not really. It’s just that I get to see a version of myself that’s disciplined yet relaxed, connected to my kids yet apart, we’re side by side, never lonely. Our cottage is too small for privacy and the beach too open for isolation. The ebb and flow is woven throughout our days, we move with the tides. It’s hard to leave that behind, knowing that as much as I try to carry our experience home, we won’t live like that for another year. The ocean is far away. Life rushes in.

The tides

My kids don’t turn over and over in their minds what could’ve been better, why it didn’t last forever, why do we have to have a mortgage or jobs or goals that sometimes set our teeth on edge? Some would say, “But of course, they’re children, what do they know?” And I would counter with, “They know everything.” They leave our time in Maine full. They’re drunk on fresh air and washed clean by the salt water. They’ve seen old friends, met new people, read books, painted, and started collections of shells or glass or feathers. They’ve stayed up late, slept in, and walked the beach with me before breakfast and after dinner. They’ve taken it all in. Until we return again, they’ll tap back into these moments to soothe nightmares, to take their mind off of their worries, and to feel calm when life tosses them up in the air, when friends hurt them, when life gets hard.

They accept that our time here is a cycle, like the tides. There’s no use in pushing against it. The ebb gives us a chance to appreciate what can’t be seen when the water is high, when our time was ahead of us. They see abundance. I just notice that the water is gone, our time back out to sea, and all I see is absence.

Not for the first time, I’m drawn in by their unintentional example. To quiet my worries over what’s to come and to soak in what’s just happened. What’s still happening now as I unpack, wash piles of sheets and beach towels, still able to smell the salt water and sweat and sunscreen in our swimsuits. I always set one aside and leave it on top of our washing machine, sometimes until January. The trips to the laundry room always a reminder that there is a break in this seemingly endless performance. There will be an intermission.

Word of honor

The word gratitude is something I’ve come to despise, it’s an end zone celebration wrapped in a hashtag, a hippie dippy way of punctuating images and thoughts where gratitude should be obvious. Smiling faces, beach sunsets, ice cream, family, friends, a wedding, sparklers, fruit plucked straight from the field or tree. Of course. It’s what I feel, and hopefully is obvious in the images I post, but I can’t bring myself to use that word. So instead I’ll choose honor.

I will honor the generations of my family for discovering and returning to a place that has served as the spiritual center of my life. A place of calm, of celebration, of inspiration, of that simple line we trace through our days. I will honor the hard work that allows us to return every year, especially the years when we’ve had to scrape to make it happen. I will honor our time here and not fixate on what’s to come (and, yeah, I’ll need to work extra hard on that one). I will honor that this time is fuel for our imaginations and a balm for our relationships — those weeks counteracting the distractions and disconnections of all the months before. I will honor the saddest mornings, the happiest afternoons — the tides that return us to ourselves. I will honor that things end. They just do.

And I will honor the fact that we always, always write our postcards on the very last day, in a frenzy, and slide them into the mailbox on our way out of town. As we return, from the sea.