Get In Here

You don’t see a lot of bean bag chairs in retirement homes. Nor do you see a lot of people at the beach when a storm blows in. If it’s true that 99% of life is showing up, then what happens when you arrive to find something you didn’t bargain for? The choice seems simple. Stay, or go.

If quizzed on a game show, I’d say that an unexpected bean bag chair can appear faster in life than an unexpected storm. Virtually every home goods catalog features the cozy chairs, and their clever fabric loops make them easy to pull around. Storms are a close second in the speed department, though. Last summer, my family arrived in Hyannis, Massachusetts after a two-day drive from Virginia.  We opened the car doors to a sunny sky, swung out our cramped legs, and sprinted across the dunes. Before we had time to lose a shoe in the sand, the wind picked up. We didn’t perseverate on the choppy water or the rolling waves of sea grass. All we thought was: Wow, we have the whole beach to ourselves!  “Ow,” my daughter said, rubbing her eye when the beach towel she was holding whipped up and smacked her in the face. “You know what,” I called, as she and her brother plowed into the ocean, “let’s just skip the sunscreen today.”  From the pace of the clouds moving overhead, we had fifteen minutes at best before we’d need the shelter of our rolling dumpster.

I got out my paints. The azure sky was a color I could mix quickly from Cobalt Blue and a dab of Aquamarine. Faster, I told myself, trying to fix the scene before it changed completely. I drew the horizon line, a descending swath of dark green flecked with bright summer homes. In the distance the houses looked like Chicklets, and I skipped over them with my brush to keep the paper white. The clouds were over us now. Without thinking, I dipped my brush into a square of Charcoal Grey and dragged it across the sky.  The painting belonged to the storm now, never mind what I’d set out to capture. “Three more minutes!” I called to the kids, who were splashing wildly in the waves. At this moment I knew that the painting would hang at my bedside to remind me of something. Something I could feel but not name.

My husband grabbed our unopened cooler with one hand, and gathered our kids’ far-flung clothes with the other. I rocked from a sitting position to a kneel. “If I’m going to look at you every morning and night, you damn storm,” I bargained, “then I’m razing your beachfront condos.” I erased the unremarkable structures at the water’s edge and dropped in turn-of-the century Shingle-Style mansions from Newport. I drew chimneys and porches, and a gable dormer on the third floor just for me. Inside the dormer room, under the window sill, I packed a bookshelf with encyclopedias. No one reads encyclopedias anymore, and I’m no different. But there I can flip a volume open to any page and breathe in the musty scent that’s grown deep and comforting from moisture blown in from storms. Thunder shakes the floor and lightening punctuates the darkness. I grab the loop of a bean bag chair and retire to the window. Mist flies through the screen and I watch from the edge of wonder and fear.