Day 9: Atlantic Beach, Part 2

Today is my mother Janet's birthday. Happy Birthday, Mom. I love you to the moon and back.

So y'all know that I'm Erin. I'm a brown-eyed lady from the Midwest, of mixed Northern European heritage, and thus fair skinned. Time in sun = pink-cheeked lady.

And these are my folks, Janet and Mike. She of hazel eyes, auburn hair, long legs, and childlike laughter. He of blue eyes, great height, big hugs, and boundless curiosity. 

I am their eldest child, born a few days after their first wedding anniversary.

When I was in high school, my father turned to me and remarked, "I feel bad for you girls. The relationship your mother and I have is something that, the older I become, I realize may be a bit of an anomaly."  I remember resenting the comment at the time. Surely I can find what you have, Dad.

Now I'm left to wonder.

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Friday morning, after returning from my run, I made coffee for us to drink in our sound-side room. We all crowded onto the balcony to look out across the waving saw-grass and watch the boats depart. We readied ourselves and headed to the beach.

Mid-morning and it was already warm, but the breeze was strong out of the southwest, and we had an umbrella and beer. We sat in idle silence, they quieted by how beautiful it was and I now well-practiced in the art of slow beach days. When it got warm, we headed into the ocean - me first, to swim up and down the shore; my big-shouldered father, next; my mother, last.

"She won't get all the way in," he said over his shoulder to me. "She's never been crazy about getting under the water in the ocean.

But as we stood, she waded out - knee-deep, hip-deep, chest-deep. Squealing with laughter, jumping against the waves, gasping at the chill of the water.

I've never seen my mother like this. "Look at you! You look so happy!" I shouted inland.

"I feel like I'm twelve!" she yelled back.

And for a few moments, I saw her as she would have been then, long before she became a mother, before she met and married my father, when she was a gangly pre-teen with the big smile and crinkly eyes she would pass on to me.

She made her way out to my father, sunglasses still perched on her face.

"Here," I said, taking them. "Let me take them back in."

And I headed back, leaving them in the ocean together to be what they were before Mom and Dad. When they were Janet and Mike.

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Later, after many more hours of sun and a long walk down the beach, we all headed back to the room to nap in the air-conditioning.

Later still, we roused gradually to freshen up, drink white wine and snack on guacamole. My father told me about the book he was reading, Brian Greene's latest work exploring parallel universes.

"One theory is that our whole universe constitutes one hole in an infinite slice of Swiss cheese, so to speak," he gestured as he spoke. "One infinite plane with infinite numbers of holes, of universes."

I was reminded of my morning, of thinking about the sun rising every hour somewhere on Earth.

"Kind of makes your head spin a little, doesn't it?"

Kind of makes you feel really, really small and yet really, really big at the same time.

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We sat dockside that evening, enjoying a cocktail before dinner, watching the sun set.

After I snapped this picture, I realized that this moment was just one iteration of the same gesture over their three decades together, a parallel moment across hundreds of thousands of moments.

Well-practiced and thoughtfully automatic.

I want that.

I remembered my father's words from years before and I smiled wistfully.

I hope I find that. I hope it finds me. I hope I haven't missed it already.

Thunderclouds rolled in as our dinner hour approached and as we dined, we talked about getting up to see the sun rise and then going to the local diner.

It rained briefly, spectacularly, until we got back to our hotel room, when the skies opened up and then continued to dump off and on all night. The rain beat against the sliding glass door and the wind ripped across the sound.
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"Three things cannot be long hidden: the Sun, the Moon, and the Truth." - Buddha

 

The sun was hidden Saturday morning; the previous evening's storm clouds crowded out its rising.

Its light filtered weakly pink across the sky and we huddled against the unexpected chill in the air.

For what the sky lacked, the water compensated. Smooth as glass, waves rolling methodically in. The storm had wiped it clean, for the moment.

We all sat silently, enjoying the calm of this morning. I felt cradled in the strength of their love, of our love.

So separate from them now and yet so much a part of them.

My height, his. My speech, hers. My energy, hers. My stubbornness, his.

My love of this world, theirs.