Sifting through seashells and jawbones

Missing the annual family vacation in Bethany Beach

The axis of my earth tilts around a humble stretch of Delaware shore. I am missing, for the first time, my annual family vacation at Bethany Beach. A place I hold at my baseline, my bones furling forward to protect it like a sandcastle moat. When the drawbridge to this inner Bethany goes down, I can crab-like scuttle from spiral conch to slipper shell, self to self. I’ve done this all my life.

In the beginning. Place as personal vortex, where all the stars and tides and moonrises and sea creatures stand witness. A baby with my name sitting on a towel attempting to slowly but surely eat each grain of sand, sometimes by the mouthful, and sometimes just one by salty one.

For 2 weeks every summer, my family donned silly hats and let the foaming waves kiss our feet, watched as porpoises swam in one direction by morning, and then back the other direction by evening while we hammered, pounded, and cracked open our Old Bay-smothered blue crabs in the pink Skagen twilight, heat lighting threatening in the distance.

Summer comes, summer goes, summer comes again and each time I was a year older. It’s where I first was allowed to stay outside at the playground and witness the colors fade from sunny day to the “complete pitch dark” of night, a badge of bravery, well-earned. The next year, a red-headed girl I met from Connecticut made me into a sand mermaid, complete with giant breasts. I had to dig my way out. The year after that, I trudged through tidepools seeking treasures, imagining each sand bar was its own lonely island on its own watery world.

Years later, my teen-aged-self lit that darkness with bonfires, shooting-star sightings, and new friends talking on the inhale drunk-earnest and on the exhale sweet-n-sexy clove or bud that lingered into stolen kisses, truth-or-dares, and swapped confessions until the stars faded to behold the smudged cherry lipstick dawn.

Many years ago. The spirals of seashells, high and low tides, summer constellations vain like Cassiopeia. I met my friends J and P in the dark and for years, we had ourselves quite a time, our friendship spreading past Bethany’s annual two-week bounds. But too few years later, in the playground gazebo, while the daylit teeter-totters crashed up and down, my phone rang and broken-voiced P sounded the foghorn that J had taken his life. Yeah, all of it, there was no question. One wave comes in, the other goes out. Sometimes still, I think I see his revved-up ghost run through the dunes, smiling and encouraging just one more skinny-dip, while scattering flocks of petrified piping plover.

2 years ago, my dad found the jawbone of a fish on the porch and showed it to our cameras, opening and shutting the spooky little teeth. He walked back and forth to the lighthouse and lay in the sun and toasted to the moonrise with beer from my brother-in-law’s Dogfish Head growler. He laughed with his granddaughters, told them fabulous made-up stories, and blew magic bubbles on the breeze.

And one month after that, so suddenly, he was gone. In my Pacific western sunset life, it’s easy to forget that the Atlantic east is where the moon rises over the ocean in a dazzle disco shimmer, and so does the sun.

1 year ago, my family, we Bethany’d without him. His presence was everywhere and nowhere in a million reassuring and devastating ways. The trees he trimmed, his handwriting on the lint trap, the coconut where he left his keys, the patch on the screen, seashells he arranged in the garden just so, the bubbles he blew into the breeze — he was there, if you listened to the tides and the seashells just right — I mean at least we all said so.

Even with a Bethany Beach to turn to, growing up is hard. Right now, my mom, sisters, brother-in-law, and nieces sleep to the shush of the Bethany waves and I’m not there due to obligations that are feeling less and less obligatory. It feels every which way west of wrong, an annual rhythm sucker-punch. The Bethany axis tapping my Pacific spine, saying boo where are you. Coming up against my dad’s 2-year death-aversary, still trying to get to those tidepools, missing a place feeling like grinding growing pains, salty and grainy. Grief like the ghost of a slippery fish with a big fat toothsome jaw.