The car is loaded with three beach chairs, a cooler full of food, two cases of bottled water, a suitcase holding more clothes than I can wear over three days, a novel marketed as the perfect beach read, and three bottles of 70 SPF sunscreen. Before I admonish Owen one final time to be a good dog, I hang on the back door a tin sign that says, “Gone to the beach.”
For a dozen years now, the three of us have been doing this – manipulating our schedules and maneuvering around obstacles to spend three or four days at the beach together. We converge every summer on this same spot on the north end of Tybee Island to sit in the sun and watch the container ships on the horizon, to walk the tide line looking for shells, to eat boiled peanuts, to read in short snatches between conversations.
This year it almost didn’t happen. Despite elaborate computations that would have made Miss Kemp, our high school trigonometry teacher, proud, we managed to make reservations for the exact day on which Tropical Storm Debby turned the southeast Georgia coast into the set for the Weather Channel. We are a stubborn bunch, though, and after further elaborate computations an alternate date was reached and, so, here we sit, toes in the sand.
The sun is as bright as it always is. The tide rushes in as it always does. The seagulls squawk and dive-bomb the peanut shells as they always do. Missouri and Virginia and Bulloch County seem, if only for a moment, far away.
The three of us met in 1967. We navigated adolescence within sight of each other and remember things about each other that no longer matter. Two of us attended the same college. Two of us had the same major and chose the same profession. Two of us lost our fathers in the last year. Our lives have, for over 55 years, twisted and turned and overlapped despite the physical distance.
Every year there is something new to talk about – a longed-for success, an unexpected loss, a professional dilemma, a personal disappointment – but we always end up dissecting how this annual rite came to be, how this place became sacred, how those awkward sixth-graders became confident (if sometimes weary) women and that they remain friends.
We are old enough now to see these days for what they are – a brief respite from lives that haven’t turned out exactly as we had planned, a gentle reminder that friendships can last even when other things don’t, a simple confirmation that it is worth what it took to get here. We are old enough to be grateful.
Copyright 2024
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