Waiting

At the shore this month, June being the time I can return each year, I am this morning waiting for the wireless repair man to show up for his 8 am to 12 pm appointment.  So I don’t miss a faint knock on the door, I’ve posted myself in the front window and set myself the task of writing this (albeit on Word, since I can’t as yet get in to any program that depends on the internet to carry it off).  All such technological appliances have been out since a lightning strike the other night touched very close to the house during one of the quick summer storms that had come and gone all last week. Normally, being unplugged wouldn't bother me a bit...at the shore, it's a treat to be disconnected.  But alas, the reality of work to be done cuts in.

Despite the rainy blotches each day, there was actually plenty of time to play outdoors, though the challenge of gauging the possibilities of a deluge was always present, especially for Joseph and Alexander, who were here too, biking and scootering their way around town for a too-short week.  

Crabbing, miniature golf, amusement park, beach walks, kites that fly (or don’t), ice cream runs, and ocean dips all began with a look to the skies to check the position of the wind and clouds.  We managed a lot of things…the library, games of hunt-and-seek in the dunes and the gazebos, kickball and baseball in the street, and digging in the sand, shoveling stones to make castles and ditches to capture crabs riding in on the waves.

In seriously inclement hours, there were games of chance, puzzles, and the Swedish chef to laugh at (“The Swedish Chef is a professional chef, sort of”, the warning warns only half comically.  "Don't try this at home.").  No matter how many times we have seen his shenanigans, big belly laughs ensue anew.  

And in any weather, morning or night, we build things…we come from, after all, a family of builders.

At the shore, there is always plenty to do, including simply ignoring the weather and walking out into it anyway.

The lightning strike, however, which came only minutes after we had returned from a long walk along the water, scurrying a little as the dark clouds began to chase us, wasn’t something to take lightly.  We were safe in the house by then, true, but though it didn’t affect the electricity or damage any property, it was a reminder that nature pretty much always has the upper hand…a lesson not too long ago learned in these parts by the storm that ravaged the coast here.  You couldn’t tell by today’s strong sun and variegated blue sky, nor from the number of people strolling, biking, running past as I write this, that a natural event like that was uppermost on anybody’s mind.  Still, there are signs here and there…a house abandoned after fire, a few empty lots where stately old homes or small cottages had stood for half a century or more, deteriorating roof tiles sticking up from the sand.

And now, instead of the plants we are used to on dunes and in sandy yards…sedge, sea grass, goldenrod, and rugosa rosa, even the prickly pear, eastern style…arching here and there to hold down the sand against wind and tide, we have new dunes, replaced by an enormous dredging project all last winter, which rise up, huge and barren, to block our view of the water from anywhere but on their apex.  Here are new spindly sprouts planted in rows, like corn, some spans of which are still sparsely new, as it is on the dune hill front of us, and some fuller where they were planted earlier and more deliberately.  

This new scape is strange…and I mean that literally, as in the noun stranger.  In all our 74 years and some here, this isn’t a seascape we’ve ever seen before; indeed, when I arrived at the beginning of the month, its starkness, though still beautiful in its way, reminded me of Sahara hills that legendary nomads roamed, with barely anything to make a shadow over it.

What makes it so startling to the psyche, at least to mine, is that not only in my own memory, but also in black and white photographs hanging in the house, in local cafes and on websites that picture the town’s past, are images of the boardwalk hanging above the sand, sometimes 10 feet above.  As children we ran jumping off it, waiting to feel the temperature below, waiting to traverse a beach that each year changed shape and expanse.  Even in the latest few decades, when the boardwalk finally met the sand for what looked, in a way disappointingly, like forever, there was still the expanse of sand toward the water as our near horizon.  Now the ocean is its own scape far over the mountain of sand we must first climb.

Change is always a waiting game, and I, for one, am waiting to see how long this new configuration against nature’s energy will last, at least in this form.  It is a lot of effort fighting the inevitable, especially when the inevitable isn’t predictable…a bit like trying to stabilize the ever-shifting sands of time.

But wait…now there are umbrellas going up at the foot of our dune, and the children next door (how I wish Alexander were still here to join them!) are dragging chairs, tables, and bottles of something as yet indistinguishable to set up a stand.  Their purpose, whatever their product, is certainly clear.  It turns out to be one of those things each child takes part in at one time or another…a lemonade stand.  Whatever change we wait for in nature’s motion, there is still some stability in the human passages of time.

Once the young sellers are settled in, they begin high-toned hawking, “Water or lemonade! Water or lemonade!”, to the endless parade of potential customers on the boardwalk, fortuitously slowing down now in the increasing heat of the sun.  I watch as they wait, hopeful, for the more generous, kid-minded…and thirsty... to stop and buy.  Their sales pitches are priceless…one little girl offers “free cartwheels” with a purchase…and if you listen carefully you can hear their pleas…”Pennies for...”; this endeavor is apparently a charitable cause.

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A few hours later, the wireless technician has come and gone, and the lemonade/water stand put away…success on all fronts.   What do I wait for now?  A little breeze, perhaps, though not much else except for next June to bring Alexander and his dad back to the shore.  It seems that the eternity of the shore is back in its always present tense.