sunset beach at sunset \\ kite flying on a windy day \\ impending storm \\ kid sister & me \\ jack \\ hole digging, day 2 \\ prohibited words & related offenders \\ ashley learns to juggle \\ evening walk \\ dusk

north carolina. all things are the same as always, except that we grow older. the house is, as usual, crowded. beth (34) and her daughter kaitlin (14); amy (33) and her boys (3 and 6); me and my sister ashley (just weeks shy of 15); my aunt and uncle. my other cousin, stephanie (30), is too pregnant and doesn't make the trip. beth and I share a bed, which is somehow hilarious and comfortable and fine. it reminds me of when we were girls, when amy and beth and I would all sleep in the same bed and I would hate waking in the middle of the night to use the bathroom because I'd have to crawl over them, afraid to rouse them in the process.

it's the same boring wonderful routine: breakfast, coffee, sunscreen, beach. I bring a book down every day but hardly read at all. we talk idly, for hours. the teenagers swim. every day I dig a giant, elaborate hole for the boys, who seem to remain unimpressed but continue to ask me for another one every day anyway. jack, the youngest, can't remember my name so I tell him he can call me whatever he wants. he names me 'hermit crab.'

the girls catch a guy from a neighboring family repeatedly checking me out as I walk past and we take to calling him 'boyfriend.' boyfriend becomes a week-long joke. 'you can't eat any more today if you want to impress boyfriend,' beth says. 'we just figured out which house boyfriend lives in,' kaitlin declares one day, triumphant.

this is literally all we do. sleep, eat, beach, trashy TV. one night we steam 4 dozen crabs. there is always shrimp, cooked in the maryland fashion, boiled in a ton of seasoning. we mix ketchup and horseradish into a seafood sauce and then we make pained faces with every bite, as the horseradish hits our noses. this is part of the endless traditions. the others: we sit on the porch in the rocking chairs, painting our nails. we play cutthroat rounds of double solitaire, a game which, incidentally, I've never encountered outside my own family. there are beers.

we stay for five days, then late one afternoon, it's time for my sister and me to hit the road. just off the island, we stop at alice's produce stand, where I buy butter beans and enormous, heavy tomatoes and one peach for the road. alice rings us up, and thanks us. "y'all come back now," she calls, and we are in the car again, the windows down, the radio up.

sunset beach, part 2

(crab and I were both startled when I approached him on the beach, and he scurried under this rock before I could show him to my brother)


















(a photo of the wind: one morning we got up early and biked to the east end of the island to watch the sunrise, only to get there and discover that the winds were easily 30-40 mph, blowing so hard I literally could not bike against them. the attempt to photograph my brother's bike ended up only in blurs, because I couldn't hold my hand still.)


(my sister and I got featherlocks, please pardon my stupid expression)




(our second attempt at watching the sunrise, on my final day at the beach, was much more successful than the first)









I'm back in portland now. on my final day at the beach I awoke at 5, no longer able to sleep. my mom, my brother and I biked to the end of the island to watch the sun rise, and then, after dropping our bikes at the house, walked down to our spot on the beach and went for an early morning swim. with the exception of just two small breaks, I stayed on the beach that day from 6 AM until 2:30 in the afternoon, desperate to squeeze the last drop of every moment I had left.

my mom drove me to the wilmington airport, about an hour from the island. I had showered but on my skin was the chalky residue of sunscreen, and my hair blew curly in the air from the open window. when I reached the airport we hugged and, as always, my mother had tears in her eyes. how do I keep doing this? I wonder. I said some insipid thing like I'll see you at christmas or you should come out for thanksgiving! but it felt trite and false. I loaded up my huge backpack and walked through the airport door with a wave. after I had checked in, I walked briefly back outside to savor for one last instant that weather I so love.

inside the airport, I cried until the plane began boarding.

I feel too old for homesickness, yet here it is, seemingly worse than ever. back in portland, the cloudy mornings give way to sun. scott sleeps next to me. the vegetables in the garden are enormous. but inside me there is a deep gash I don't know how to fill.

sunset beach, week one

(my cousin's stash. apparently it was on sale. we call her room "the liquor store")





















this morning at 8 AM it was 85 degrees. the humidity makes my hair curl. in the mornings there is coffee, sometimes muffins. everything, including the bed, is covered in sand.

a few days ago, a bold crow stole an entire packet of my baby cousin's crackers out of a bag, then hopped five feet away from us and looked at us inquisitively. when little jack ran after him, the crow flew over the dunes with the packet. a few minutes later, we saw him fly idly by with an orange peanut butter cracker in his beak.

vacation: good.

to the sunset

in a few hours I'll take a red-eye to wilmington, nc. I'll arrive tomorrow at 8:30 in the morning, and my aunt and uncle will pick me up from the airport and drive me to the beach house on sunset beach. I'll be there for two weeks, the longest time I've spent there since 2006. spending time with me there will be two aunts, one uncle, four cousins (and three of their children), a cousin's friend, my mother, and my youngest brother and sister. there may or may not be a pet hamster in attendance.



it turns out everything that needs to be said about the beach, and what it means to me, I wrote back in 2009. I truly cannot wait.

back east

north carolina:



a blast of humidity upon setting foot outside the airport. driving to the beach house, the road was lined with myrtles. we stopped at dunkin donuts on the way -- we don't have it on the west coast and after years drinking iced coffees in college, I miss it -- and then we took the old familiar roads back to the island, watching for alligators in the golf course water hazards.

in my summer away from the beach, construction began on the new bridge, which will eventually replace the old, beloved, single lane pontoon bridge that connects the small barrier island to the mainland. other than the new bridge pilings, the island existed as a near-perfect replica of the image I keep in my memory. it makes the place feel eternal, somehow. the old dilapidated pool hall building is still on the corner; the rain still puddles on the side of the road. inside my bedroom the wood paneling is the same, and there are still the same wall hangings, the same green cot folded neatly in the closet.

five days, distilled: showers outside, in the outdoor stall nestled between the house's stilts; mornings on the beach -- by 8:30, some days -- carrying the chairs down the new walkway, watching the sun grow brighter over the still-empty beach as early morning runners pass by. afternoons biking from the house to the end of the island, where we comb for shells and on one adventurous day I swim across the intracoastal waterway that separates our island from the one farther north; I emerge from the water and wave to my aunt and cousins, who remain on the opposite shore. a singular feeling, the sensation of swimming across a body of water and surfacing on a different island. vaguely like columbus.



at night we eat shrimp and steamed crabs, standing at the kitchen counter; we sit on the porch and paint our nails or borrow someone's wifi on our laptops or, in my case, sit in rocking chairs with one bare foot pressed against the porch railing, listening to the locusts in the trees and watching the approaching thunderstorm. we joke about the real estate we will purchase nearby (trailers in trailer parks, mostly) and amuse ourselves with long strings of "do you remember" stories, which are of particular interest and delight to my oldest cousin's 11-year-old daughter. do you remember the night my cousin and her friend ended up in jail, after the friend was pulled over on I-40 in clinton for reckless driving and couldn't pay the $200 fee? do you remember how beth jumped into the dunes that night we ran from the police after the party on 12th street was raided and we were all found to be underage and loaded up with beer? do you remember the year we walked barefoot to the far end of the island each night for four nights, in search of sand dollars -- a trip that we only just learned is a total of 6 miles?



my cousin stephanie and I left the beach quickly on wednesday morning, in order to beat the bridge, which opens to boating traffic every hour on the hour. There was none of the usual lingering goodbye, none of the usual attempts at imprinting everything indelibly to memory. after so many years, those attempts are unnecessary anyway. on the ride home, we stopped for boiled peanuts and homemade peach ice cream (the ice cream stop, off Hwy 701 in tiny Newton Grove, NC, is tradition). I heard the details of her upcoming wedding as I watched tobacco fields slowly give way to traffic.



maryland was snowballs with an old friend whom I don't see or talk to often enough; a reunion night that lasted until 4 AM; the first morning of my life where I awoke hungover at my mom's house, walked into her bedroom, plopped on her bed and said, "I don't feel very good." it was a daily thunderstorm; riding roller coasters at hersheypark; playing card games with my brother; watching my mom's new chickens peck for bugs in the backyard. sunday night we stood for a long time in the backyard, watching the fireflies hover over the neighbor's 10-acre soybean field.

"If you'd never seen them before," my mother says, "they would seem like magic." they don't live in oregon or in syracuse; I haven't seen them in years. they do.