live by the ocean

made fun of me once when I said that I wanted to lived by the sea…rolled their eyes. Everyone does, was their reply. I don’t think so. I just read a comment by someone here on 43things, someone w/whom I’ve connected who said she’s not an ocean person. So not everyone DOES want to live near the water. I, though, for some reason, am drawn to it. I’m scared to death of the depths of the ocean but feel compelled to sail the water, to live near it, on it. To be away, I guess…

The whole ocean/beach thing for me is about being alone there. It is about getting up with the sun and heading out for a walk or run on the sand when no one else is there. It is about sitting on the deck or balcony I WILL have and looking out across that great vast body of water that ends up…wherever, depending on what beach I live on. It is about feeling alone with that vastness, looking out onto nothing. What does that mean? I’ve never been one who wants to go to outer space-can’t imagine anything scarier than freewheeling through space with no ground on which to stand, no end to the space. I want to know that it is silent and I’m (semi)alone but that there is someone out there, just past where I can see.
When we were at Myrtle Beach last year, I made Sophie get up one morning and go down to the beach to find shells with me. It was freezing and she complained the whole time but for that few minutes we were there, it felt like we were the only people on the edge of the world.

I’m going to have a little cabin by a lake or on the beach. It doesn’t have to be huge, just look like something out of a decorating magazine. My kids and I will spend the whole summer there with my sisters and their families in neighboring cabins and our annoying husbands will only come up on the weekends when we’ll cook large, elaborate meals and have clambakes and bonfires and drink a lot and stay up late talking and laughing in circles around the fire, our sweaters wrapped around our shoulders. The kids will run around until they fall asleep and we carry them inside, shuffling the sand off our feet, kicking off light switches with our elbows… In the morning, someone will make large batches of pancakes or bacon and eggs and we’ll eat them in the sunlight that pours through our little kitchen windows. Another day in the life of rich people.
If only.