We’re taking a vacation next week! It will be a whole week
with no animals to feed, no gardens to worry over, no grass to mow, no screens
to dull our minds! Or mostly no screens.
When I was a kid we spent two weeks at the beach every
summer. I loved those weeks. We rose with the sun, surf-fished endlessly,
played in the water, and lay on the sand reading. We always arrived at the shore
with a stack of books we’d selected the week before when Mom took us to the
Bookateria, a local used book store that let you trade in old paperbacks for
credit. We each got to fill a grocery bag full of books for our vacation. I
loved the possibilities of those books and the long days and quiet evenings
spent turning the pages. Some nights we played Hearts, Parcheesi, Risk, or
Rack-O. We basked in our parents’ undivided attention. On afternoons when the
sun burned too hot for the beach, we’d tramp across the dunes to Newman’s Shell
Shop and spend hours studying the shells sold by the pound and savoring the air
conditioning before picking out that year’s hermit crabs. Some nights we’d hunt ghost crabs and study
the stars. Other nights Dad would build a bonfire on the beach and we’d fish
through the tide change. We’d come home from vacation just in time to start
back to school with our coolers full of fish, our skin bronzed, and our books
crackling from the sand still left between the pages.
The one thing that was never a part of our beach vacations
was a television. Amazingly, every cottage we rented was without one! After I
grew up, my mom confessed that each summer when we pulled in to our rented
cottage, Dad would demand that we all help him untie the car top carrier and
stow the beach chairs and buckets under the house while Mom would hurry in,
locate the TV, unplug it and hide it in the Master bedroom closet where it
would stay for the duration of the vacation. Pretty clever, my parents.
