Destin – Are We There Yet?

This was your place, Dad.

This was the place you took your family every summer.

Where mother turned “brown as a berry” while dripping sandcastles with your daughters

who would only trade their seat in the sand for a ride on a float with you at the helm.

And the waves rocked us and the sun baked us and love filled us.

This is the place I brought my family

and where my family brought their families

because Josh only wants to go to “our beach”.

And we never did what tourists do because we weren’t tourists.

We were home.

This is the place I came when we knew something was wrong,

when you refused to stay in the hospital because you “weren’t sick”.

You’d never been sick.

Not even a headache.

But you were and you went.

The beginning of the end.

This place is still yours.

I feel you everywhere.

In the blue and green of the ocean

and the whitest sand of the “prettiest beaches I’ve ever seen”.

In the wind near the surf and the sidewalks along the beach road where you walked until you couldn’t.

There are some places I can’t go yet,

where walking in the door opens an empty space

where the sound of people calling out your name should be

and there will be empty barstools where we should be sitting

and you would order grits and hug the chef

and squeeze my hand, at least once while we were eating.

I know she had others, but the one I loved best was made of red cotton decorated with tiny, multi-colored flowers; a “two-piece”, it featured boy-shirts that always evoked images of a much earlier time. The color only served to highlight her tan, and I never thought her more beautiful.

My mother loved to sunbathe, and spent most mornings on the beach, supine, on a generous towel, until overwhelming heat forced her into the surf, where she stayed for a few, precious, minutes. Now, as a mother, myself, I realize that having four children attached to her floating limbs probably precipitated her quick exit.

And, sometimes, she built castles.

It started with a hole. As is true about anything worth having, a good sand castle requires work, in the form of a very deep hole. My mother supervised as one of her daughters manned the shovel. Mounds of pristine white sand piled, as the hole was dug, until water began to seep in from the bottom, forming a permanent well.

And then, we dripped. Each of us, in turn, thrust our hands inside the hole, to remove a dripping mass of grayish colored sand. We dripped turrets, we dripped landscaping, we dripped roofing. Tiny, pea-sized mounds of sand, built, one upon the other, as we dripped, and the castle grew higher and higher, and more and more elaborate.

Construction could take hours, but we had no concept of time. For each of us, it was simply one-on-one time with Mom, and we sat there until she gave the sign it was time to stop, as she rose, and strode, purposefully, towards the surf. As she bent to lower her hands into the warm, jade-colored, water, we mimicked her action, until she left us to return to her towel. And, as she lay back against the sand, we broke for our rafts, and the water.

Tag: Destin

Requiem

Drip Castles