The ritual of the beach is as predictable as the consistent swelling of waves, the rise, the crash on the sand, and the receding back into the body of the ocean. The salty wind off the water, the sound of the tide, the flat, open horizon displaying every movement of the sun and the moon, it's always the same, even if I am not.
In the morning we wake up to the sun, brighter here, coming through the windows, the shades, and filling our room with light. We wander out into the house where there is coffee and burger-sized glazed doughnuts sitting on the counter. I pull on my sports bra, shoes, socks, pull up my wild hair which is taking on a golden yellow color, and go out to run down the street, around, back up the street for a few miles. Returning, everyone is sitting on the porch with steaming cups of coffee and Bibles, quiet, reading and squinting against the glare of the sun that's now higher than the roofs that stand between our house and the beach. We read quietly, together, until the time has shifted and someone speaks, and then it turns to talking and laughing and looking over pictures from the day before. We move about slowly, drink pots of coffee, and eventually move toward inside so we can change into bathing suits. We go down to the beach, I'm always first, with chairs, towels, books, an umbrella these days, for the babies, small coolers for beer and boxes of Cheese-Itz. We sit the rest of the morning, reading, and the guys play a dozen made-up games with the football. We walk and talk, we smear more sunscreen on our sandy legs and backs, mostly we read, and the sun rises up over us like an arch, and we fall asleep. Eventually we eat a sandwich, then back to the beach for more of the same absolute heaven. In the evening an outdoor shower is wholly sublime, and we all grab glasses of wine and bottles of beer and head back down to our endless picnic blanket with the dogs, and we sit on the beach as the sun sets behind us, somewhere over the bay, taking photographs and talking about the last twenty-eight years we have spent in this very same place, possibly on these very same grains of sand.
Here I am happy. This morning I sat with my journal and a cup of coffee and found myself thinking about the fact that my baby is visiting the beach for the first time. I believe that supernaturally he or she absorbs everything I experience, so I prayed that the beach would soak into me this weekend even more than it usually does. And the prayer sort of went synonymously with this prayer, as the Spirit and the beach are so much of the same thing to me, that It would be wide, full, expansive in my heart and soul these next 6 months so that this child would be bathed in Him, as I am bathed in Him. For 6 months I have a completely captivated audience, a helpless feeder, and I want to feed him, along with Doritos and club soda with lime, the Spirit of God. This is what I've been thinking about for a few weeks and I am beginning to feel a fulness in answer to my pleas.
