“You are the meanest person ever,” her voice laughs playfully even as she loads all the pre-teen seriousness into the sentence.
I pass a large family on the beach. Parents, aunts, uncles, siblings, cousins move like ants around a mound of beach umbrellas to and from the sweetness of the sea. I smile inwardly as I know this is a family enjoying their time together. Family really know how to be “mean” to each other, treading right up to the edge of teasing and joking (and sometimes over the edge), all in the name of laughter and fun. Family teach us not to take ourselves too seriously.
I find a spot a little further down the beach, set out a towel, and enter the sweet salty sea. The warm summer water meets my toes, and I enter the comforting embrace. This is my favorite morning spot. I float on my back and stare up at the wisps of cloud on the clear blue sky. In the muffled quiet, the distant past grows loud as memories flood in of childhood beach vacations and extended family. Something in my chest awakens–a feeling of nostalgia, sweet but salty, warm and achy.
I remember the image of my Aunt Sonia putting on her suntan lotion before bed. “Why waste time in the morning?” she said with a grin as large as the Cheshire cat. She would go out at first light to swim laps while the rest of us were still thinking about breakfast. “Ready like Freddie,” my uncle said, and her new name was “Auntie Freddie.”
I am sitting under the shade of the sea grape tree at the beach in Jamaica. Everyone is out in the water. I’m taking a break from the sun, reapplying lotion, staring out into the sea, and listening to the rhythm of the waves crashing on shore.
“Why were you staring at that woman without a top?” says my uncle, laughing as he comes to shore.
“What woman?” At 11-years-old, I couldn’t see the first letter on the eye chart without my glasses. At the beach, everything was a blur. I am both embarrassed at being thought of as rude and angry at being misunderstood. I get into the water now that I can follow him to find the rest of the family. He repeats the story, and I laugh with everyone else.
“We are going to SP!” says my cousin with excitement as she enters the room. I feel like she is speaking a foreign language and somehow feel left out. This was the language of the adults who had been talking in the living room. I pretend to know what she is talking about, but she catches on. “Shaw Park,” she says, “we are going for the weekend to our favorite beach.” I smile back half-excited but still feel like the outsider in the conversation.
We all get coconuts from the man on the beach. We drink down the water inside, sweet with a hint of salty. The man splits open our empty coconut with his machete and chips off a piece to use as a spoon. All the kids enjoy the coconut jelly that lines the inside. Sometimes it is perfect, soft and gelatinous. Sometimes it is a little older, firm and crunchy, but still tasty. We settle for what we get, but we prefer the soft jelly of the younger coconuts.
I shake off the memories and make my way back to shore. I walk past that large extended family–still bantering, chattering, and laughing. As I leave the beach, I long for the days when the world was fresh and young, every experience was soft and gelatinous like those young coconuts.
“You are the meanest person ever,” I say to the beach as I get into my car. I laugh to myself and smile as more family beach memories flood in. Sweet salty nostalgia takes me right to the edge of longing.
