The Story of a Carolina Beach

If the old adage is true that a picture is worth a thousand words then I have a novel of pictures that if converted into words would total approximately 530 pages describing our recent vacation to Topsail Island.  I will not share them all with you (you're welcome), but it's been very difficult to choose because I tried, this time more than others, to only take pictures that told the story of our deep love for these Carolina beaches.  Each picture that was kept reminds me of a priceless moment spent in a priceless place and, after taking this week-long vacation eight times in the last eight years, it breaks my heart that these quiet beaches are going to be much harder to visit from now on.  I do pray that we will fall in love with our new home as deeply as we have fallen in love with this one.  And I'm not just saying that... In fact, it's been the central topic of many prayers.  But, I'm actually still trying to maintain a certain level of denial so that I don't spend my last couple of weeks here acting like a wet noodle.  So - let's move on, shall we?  Allow me to tell you my story of our beautiful North Carolina beaches.

The week starts quietly.

It ends quietly, too.  And somehow the points between that beginning and that end string themselves together ... quietly. 

I don't mean 'quietly' in the sense of noiselessness.  In fact, at no point in the entire week is there a complete cessation of sound, what with the 8 bedroom beach house full to bursting with busy bodies and the ocean consistently breathing out its crashing song.  Instead, the quietness comes from a feeling inside... deep, and real.  A quietness that dulls the pecking worries of the world and releases me from the stressful barriers that must be maintained to keep a social tactfulness.  What I mean by that is that there are no awkward excuse me's when my boogie board bumps into a stranger... and no trying to explain to my children, again, that unfamiliar towels are not for drying sandy feet and no reminding them that strangers have a much bigger personal space than do friends.  These things do not happen because there are no strangers here.  We are all friends.  Dear, dear friends.  Which makes it easy to be myself.  I can let the good in me shine through our conversations and I can be unafraid when my bad comes shining through, too.  I am loved here, with these people.  And we have the beach to ourselves. 

The mornings start early.  Someone wakes up with the sun by 6:30am, and usually that someone is small and loud and excited to wake up all of their other small and loud friends who are sleeping next to them.  They are called children and are quite unable to understand the value of falling-back-asleep or the even more coveted value of letting-the-other-sleepers-stay-asleep so, soon all of them are awake and running through the hard-floored, echo-y house, calling for adults and for breakfast.  The adults are much harder to pull from their beds.  Mostly because they went to bed just a few hours earlier after a fun-filled night playing games, or chatting, or hot-tubbing, or watching a movie, or eating the after-kids-go-to-bed snacks.  Or all of the above.

But, sleepy or not, the duty of parenting calls. So half of the adults kindly tell their partners to keep sleeping, and crawl out from under their warm, somewhat sandy sheets.  They shake the sleep from their heads and trudge downstairs to say hello to the other parents who are slothfully pulling down boxes of cereal.  The bed-headed kids are then bribed by screens of all kinds to stay quiet until the other adults awake.

The whole house is awake and moving by 9:00, and the first of the children begin appearing in their swimming suits.  The swimming suit fashion catches like fire and soon everyone is sporting one.  The smell of sunscreen floats through the air and the sliding glass doors out to the beach are opened 153 times as the eager children run from the deck to the living room to the deck to the living room, checking to see if an adult is ready to take them across the wooden bridge over the sand dunes.  The sound of the waves and the smell of the salty air excite me and hurry my pace. Sometimes I'm the first adult ready, usually I'm not, but the children do not care.  At the sight of any adult walking through the sliding glass doors the children burst out and sprint to flood the beach, dragging their boogie boards behind them. 

While some kids boogie, other kids fly kites.

(I love that the kite is upside down here... it just seems so... Miles)

 

(I watched Claire fly this kite for probably 20 minutes before I reached for my camera.  She just stood there, in that exact spot, the whole time... flying her 'tiny kite' and watching the blue tails blow in the wind.  She is one of my very favorite three-year-olds.)

While some kids boogie and fly kites, others play in the sand.

Or snuggle.

Every day is remarkably the same.  Time follows along a seamless and predictable path and one child felt proud to have it figured out by mid-week.  "I get it, Mom," he said.  "We wake up and eat breakfast, then kill some time, then go out to the beach, come in for lunch, then kill some more time, then go out to the beach again, come in for dinner, kill some more time, and go to bed."  Well, when your week consists of only three things – eating, killing time, and beaching – I see no reason to change it.  Of course, using a soup analogy, the predictable flow of the day is simply a broth.  The unique people and conversations keep things interesting and add an unpredictable array of spices and meats.


I thought 'killing time' was an interesting way to describe our down-times.  And, for a kid, I suppose it probably feels a bit like killing time.  For me, however, I like to think of it as a 'rest time'.  The kids are usually involved in one of the following:

1) Screen Time.  Large, large quantities of screen time.

2) Foosball tournaments.

(This was Miles's absolute favorite... he made himself a force to be reckoned with, and it was fun to see the older boys seek him out for a game).

3) Playing games.

4) But mostly screen time.  Large, large quantities of screen time.

The adults killed time by reading books, checking e-mail, dozing on the couch, preparing food, talking, talking, talking and laughing.   So much laughing.  This trip, we laughed away an entire afternoon taking pictures of ourselves after I kindly demonstrated the difference between taking pictures from below vs. taking pictures from above.   (Taking these kinds of pictures is a skill I learned from my dear friend, Melissa)

I'll refrain from posting my friends' ugly pictures... for now.  Leverage, you see.  Anyway, they're not as lucky to look so eerily like John Travolta when he's all dressed up like a woman in Hairspray.  (Look again - you'll see it.)

Lunch is always delicious.  So is dinner.  Four out of five meal-times, I simply walk from the beach into the house and am met with fantastic new smells as one of the other families puts the finishing touches onto the meal that they've been preparing for the house. The other time, I get to prepare something myself... always picked carefully to balance deliciousness with ease of preparation.  We sit together to eat.  More talking.  More laughing.  Always complimenting the chef.  The beach menu is always one of my favorite things. 

After lunch clean-up and a little more 'killing time', the ocean starts calling again.  This time we might catch some sand crabs, get buried in the sand, or build sand castles.

Maybe we'll find the jackpot of sea-clammy-things and fill up a couple of boogie boards.  (Lily, while throwing handfuls of the creatures to the pile said "Looks like we're eatin' well tonight!"  I laughed.  Hard.  Mostly because... gross.)

  
Or scour the shores for shark teeth.

 
We ladies might sit in the sand and chat with each other and the babies while the men play a game of Frisbee 500.

And we might laugh when they lose their frisbee in the surf because they look so much like sad little puppies,

but we cheer extra loud when they find it again.  We watch them play and we comment, every single year, on how lucky we feel to have such great, great men in our lives.  I feel secretly lucky to have the greatest one out there... and I know that each lady feels she has the exact same secret about her own.

Eventually, someone gets cold and pulls the party back inside.

So we eat some gourmet dinner and then, maybe on a special night we might go back out to the beach in our pajamas to play a life-sized version of foosball.

Or, on an extra special night, the adults might take shifts out to eat at a local sea-food restaurant.  Half the adults go out while the other half feed the children, then they swap and the late group goes out while the early dinner crew puts the children to bed.

(Brian and I went in the late shift with these crazies.  We spent the drive out there belting out the newest hit pop song and belted it out even louder when we realized we were all just a little embarrassed to like it so much...  and then, can I tell you just how much I love this picture?  First of all, Kathleen's mad-eye-Moody eye makes me laugh but then, at the same time, these faces almost make me cry because I just love them so, so, so much.)

(We tried a lot of new foods... some good... some not so good.  Take a closer look at Merrill's face... I couldn't crop it out when I realized he's 'helping' Cami eat the crab.)

 Or, on an extra extra special night, we might let just a couple of the kids stay up past dark to look for ghost crabs with the adults.

(All four of these faces are priceless... excited boys and proud daddies.)

Yes, this beach is a special place.  Are Carolina beaches more special than most?  I don’t know.  All I know is that this is a very happy place for me.

And for my family.

We will miss you.

But, at least we left our mark.