Life is waves.
I’m not writing that because I think it’s particularly deep; it’s just that our family has been frequenting the local “real beach” lately: Manly and its surfer waves rather than the calmer harbour beaches we used to stick to.
So far, only The Kid has ventured out into the waves with me or The Husband while Little Brother remains at the shoreline or on the sand, safe inside his towel. But this week, we begged him to join us.
He refused. We begged again. He refused again. And so it went, this rhythm, until we bribed him with the promise of ice cream. And so it was that the four of us made it past the breakers and into the calm, then the cresting waves. We rode them together. It was everything.
On our way out, TK got a bit too confident and ran straight into a shoreline-breaker–with his face. It took him out, and he was a bit shaken. Then he told the story about fifty times, and we tried again. And we found, the four of us, a new rhythm: the rise and fall, the rocking, the lifting, the lowering. Together.
TH took the boys then to get the promised ice cream, and I returned the boogie boards to our spot on the beach. Then I turned back. Toward the water I went.
As I headed into the surf, I had a feeling that twinned the one I had whenever I stepped out of my apartment building in New York: a freedom, an excitement, an open-ended promise. The world spreading out in front of me.
I remember the first time I ever went to New York, how a friend drove The Sis and me to the airport and Weezer’s “Island in the Sun” was playing through her car speakers, and it was March so there wasn’t much sun yet, but we were headed to an island over spring break so it felt right. And now, we live on this island in the sun (per LB, who is studying Australia at school: “Did you know that Australia is an island that’s also a continent?”), and there are parallels to my old life: the rhythm of repetition, of a life lived in waves that both lift and pummel, that always lead back to shore. To home, wherever that may currently be, which is to say, here: on this island, in this moment, through this wave…until the next comes along, like it and different at the same time.