04/12/98

All summer long our parents made weekend trips up to our beach cabin on The Island. Two hours and one ferry ride later, we'd glide down the long road from the forest to the shore where our house was the last one on the point. As soon our car pulled into the driveway we'd be squirming, anxious to get out and run down to the beach. Tumbling from the confines of the car, we wanted to race around exploring everything, but still had to help unpack suitcases and put away the groceries we'd bought on the way up. Gulls would curve low overhead, suspended on the brisk, salt wind of the bay, baleful yellow eyes scanning our movements in case we dropped something edible. Crunching back and forth in the grit and sand of the driveway between the car and the cabin, we fretted at the delay while our parents insisted on getting settled in. As soon as we were all inside my brother and I would beg to be allowed to search for firewood. At last our parents would say yes and we'd dash outside and down the short, sandy path to the tideline where we'd investigate the length of the point on both sides before starting to gather armfuls of silvery driftwood. Each weekend some new treasure would have drifted ashore: a huge log, a dead fish, a cluster of bright green kelp pods, an old frisbee.

Once we'd patrolled our territory, re-establishing our claim on the few hundred yards of beach we thought of as ours, we'd straggle back to the house laden with firewood. Dad would build a roaring fire, carefully arranging the wood and driving back the last remnants of the week's damp sea air. Mom would make sandwiches for lunch, and we'd eat hastily, gobbling down tunafish or peanut butter and jelly on homemade white bread cut extra thick. Afterwards, we were ready to explore again, lingering only long enough to do the dishes before ducking away to build forts, and collect shells, and wade in the tide pools, and fill up the long, long hours of the weekends which seemed endless to our childish notions of time. At night we'd lie whispering in our bunk beds, reading comics by flashlight under the covers when we got tired of being hushed. The weekends seemed to go on forever, leaving us sunburned and freckled with salt in our hair and sand in our Keds. There was never enough to read, and always enough time to just lie on our bellies counting the tiny seashells in their endless, multicolored variety or stare out at the bay watching the ships go out to sea.

The weekends don't seem very long any more.