There is a chapel in the town of Seaside, on County Road 30A on Florida’s Gulf Coast: a white clapboard structure behind an artist’s colony, set among the gingerbread, Truman Show-filmed houses, with a postage-stamp square of grass rolling out in front of it.
I didn’t get married there.
I wanted to, though, and I called from my office at the time on 51st and 2nd in New York, only to be left with mouth hanging open at the required rental fee for a twenty-minute ceremony. So we married down the road instead, at a spot on the beach that didn’t require a deposit of our firstborn child and was perfectly beautiful nonetheless. But I do love that little chapel, landmark that it is of my teen-and-afterward years, symbol of one of my favourite places in the world: that beach.
Now I have a few more favourite places, and beaches.
We just returned from one of our domestic jaunts in Australia, this time to the Great Barrier Reef city of Cairns in Queensland, a three-hour flight north of Sydney. Cairns is, in a word, hot–and not in the Hansel way, but in the literal, temperature, pits-and-everything-else sweaty kind of way–which, given our trip was in the spring month of October, made us breathe a prayer of thanks that we weren’t there in the height of summer, when my perspiration would surely have been a rolling river.
The holiday was eventful, and not. We had plenty of quiet moments in the room and at the breakfast buffet, a couple of hours of the Hamilton soundtrack in the car driving to a crocodile farm and seaside town to the north, whining and complaints per usual, an afternoon at the hotel pool. We also had a Ferris wheel ride over the city (the kids never get tired of my story of when The Sis puked on one when we were kids), a semi-submarine ride through the underwater wildlife of the reef, and a too-close-for-comfort feeding of the aforementioned crocodiles. The Kid barfed after a particularly rough boat ride to the reef island. I enjoyed a solo cup of coffee on the hotel balcony one morning (inspiring; rare; #blessed).
And there were a couple of moments that felt like echoes from a past, but contiguous, life. There was the night I sat on the balcony while The Husband worked in the lobby and the boys slept near me, and I surveyed the scene below–lit-up Ferris wheel, lighthouse in the distance, city noises blaring–and was taken back to the nights of my childhood spent on the balconies of holiday rentals: that sense of life happening all around me but not requiring anything of me; the incomparable peace of the water below and the feeling that I’d finally found somewhere I belonged. Now I felt it again, in another country on another beach in another hemisphere with my three new people–not mom and dad and sister but husband and son and son. A sense of landing, and place. A sense of home.
How far we often have to go to find it.
And yesterday, we drove north after the croc feeding and ate overlooking the water, across from a white clapboard chapel, and we walked over to it after lunch: the kids and TH targeting the playground while I peeled off and veered left, photographing the church and being reminded, always, of other things: the same, but different.
There has been so much of this in my life, and in our move across the world: this sense of details replicated. Of friends who remind me of people back home. Of Costco, but with different products. Of us, the four of us, but three years older, a triplet of Australia-spent years under our belts that have rendered us both at home and between homes; homed and homeless. We can’t plan ahead too far or stock up too much, even with Costco: we take it one year, one day at a time, in the most flagrant disruption of my former, intricately-planned way of life imaginable.
But the view.
We have been located, and relocated, and the home that we find–the place I’ve always felt at home–has had, always, an expanse to view: something bigger than me and my plans and my self-insured surety. That expanse, that unpredictable vastness, is where I have always been home, been located, been lost…and found.