Blue Spaces

My oldest was here in California from Boston last week.

This is coming home, still. Of course it always will be. But she’s now out of college and working. This trip was her February vacation from the elementary school where she teaches.

She still sleeps in her childhood bedroom when she comes home. Of course she does. But now, she stages out of a carry-on in the middle of the floor. There’s no point to moving in to drawers for one week. It’s too temporary. Because this is now a Visit.

And as it can when you have visitors, it felt holiday-ish to have her here. Like we should have dessert after dinner. Or watch a movie every night. Or go on an outing.

That’s what we did last weekend. After a long morning spent in pajamas and indecision, we thought to drive the 25 minutes up over the hills that I consider to be behind our house but could in truth sit in any direction from our house because locations are none of my business. If we take a right off of our street, I regard that as behind. But it’s neither here nor there: the point is we drove to Half Moon Bay, named so because of its crescent-shaped beach, though I’d always thought the name was more astronomically-derived — like you could only ever see half the moon from there? I don’t know — I had never really thought it through I guess.

On the windy drive to the coast, we called my older son in Vermont. The 5/6 of us calling the 1/6 of us. Fractions become facts in this nest-leaving stage of parenthood. They are a benign sort of fraction — the unwholeness a direct result of kids out there doing the great/fun/interesting things they need to do — but they are fractions nonetheless.

And hearts don’t pie chart well. You don’t allot a piece to each person you love. We all know this: you allot the whole thing over and over again. No some of parts, just the sum. For everyone. Which is what can make fractions so upsetting.

My son reports that it has snowed and snowed, a weather state he has previously described as disgusting.

Having grown up on the east coast, I know this adjective choice to be perfect. I understand that February snow is not the same as December snow. Whereas December snow is an enhancement, February snow is an impediment. In December you really want that white Christmas; in February you only want a green spring.

In the past week, his car has been towed because of plowing (and, yes: because of where he parked it! But we miss him! So we don’t litigate!)

He tells us about his scrimmage. I ask what he’s had to eat lately. My youngest tells him some facts he’s learned at school about the California Gold Rush in case he doesn’t know (What did they find? Gold. Where? California. How? In a rush.).

I ask my son if the shirt I shipped him got there. He doesn’t think so? But he isn’t sure. There is one box he’s picked up, but it looks too large to be a t-shirt. We all lament that there’s no way to find out what is actually in the box.

“If only you could get to the bottom of this,” we say.

“I know. That’s why I’m so confused,” he responds, which will be the Little Thing I keep from this call.

Outside of this car and this connection, so many Big Things are going quite wrong. I’ve been clinging to Little Things more than ever. I’ve been worried they might be all we have.

We tell my son we wish he was with us. He says he wishes that too. We mean it and we don’t, and he means it and he doesn’t. Of course I’d love to see him crammed in the backseat between his siblings, but it would be wrong if this was where he was right now. He shouldn’t be here because he’s got too much going on there.

Is it good to be reminded you’re missed? This is something I’ve wondered with kids living far away. Is it always nice to hear? Or can it sometimes be a first germ of homesickness? Am I supposed to keep the missing a secret at this point? Act like there’s nothing profound about their absences, nothing profound about the pastness of their little times here with me.

That things are just humming along and I hardly notice the tightly made beds or the too-many leftovers or the too-few shoes all over the floor in every room.

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Studies have shown and Instagram has told me that people are happier living near water. These so-called blue spaces are known to lower stress, improve mental health, increase physical activity. These are places that are so beneficial and universally good for us that we can only assume an executive order to eliminate oceans is forthcoming.

When we pull into the beach parking lot, we leave my son to his snow and friends and practice. We pay at a kiosk, debatably necessary on a Sunday, but who cares: long live US Parks! We walk towards the staircase down to the sand. The path is cut amongst scrubby brush and by the mouth, there’s a bench for sitting and thinking sad, ocean-y thoughts. The kind you can only bring to the sea.

Northern California beaches are not the sunny propositions of Southern California. Nor are they the easy breezy kinds of the Eastern seaboard in the summer. Northern California beaches are seasonally agnostic. They are notoriously foggy in July. They might toss an actual beach day your way in January. The weather is less distinctly patterned, but any day could be anything. That’s the excitement. That’s the appeal.

Today is not a surprise warm winter beach day, but as we reach the sand, we see a few little girls who are in bathing suits and about to swim. I am dressed like I could leave this beach and go straight to a chairlift. We agree the little girls are crazy, but in a brave, even hopeful way.

“Over there is the land of the dinosaurs,” my youngest motions to his left as we step unevenly over the footprints of beachgoers who’ve come before us.

We all look over to see that he’s right. Brownish and porish cliffs loom attentively over the ocean, aquatic helicopter parents. Watercolor skies confuse the horizon line. The ocean and sky becoming one, the planet perhaps finally folding in on itself, giving up.

The haze and patina make it look possible that a whole other epoch is just a ways down the beach. The Mesozoic sitting right beside the Holocene, fully visible, fully present.

As if somewhere out in the water, lobe-finned fish swim with no idea that they’re the start of Something. That in millions and millions of years, their descendants will walk and talk and breathe air and have all the skills and tools necessary to their undoing.

I think briefly that prehistoric times might feel very welcome right now. Before all this history we’re drowning in, when at least the predators were obvious — oversized and fanged and ferocious. Never wearing suits.

I remember that scientists last week had briefly upgraded the chances that an asteroid would hit earth in 2032, and how reading that didn’t feel as much like bad news as it once might have. And that when the chances were again downgraded, I felt a little loss over such a much more charming and cinematic kind of existential crisis.

As we start down the beach, I look around and think it would be nice to have a dog right now. But because at a lot of other points in our family life we have thought it wouldn’t be nice or even possible to have a dog, we don’t.

So we’re forced to entertain each other.

My youngest wants to race. I can’t — my knees are also from the time of the dinosaurs — but my husband and two daughters take turns against him, up and down the beach, crossing lines drawn in the sand.

All around us, people in communion with the ocean, and yet the ocean with no real idea of what it’s being told. Everyone here today for their own reasons, but the ocean unable to tell the difference between a happy beach walk and a grief-y one.

Because the ocean doesn’t know. It doesn’t know about plane crashes or egg prices or senseless deaths or a metastastizing administration.

The ocean just sits and receives, like your one friend who is an exceptionally great listener. And it gives back its expansiveness, its promise.

Reminding us we’re small without saying a thing.

And always remaining resolute in its ocean-ness. Answering to the moon alone. Sending its waves towards us and then thinking better of it, and taking them back. Over and over. Climbing up the beach twice a day, high on itself, as if contemplating a life on land once and for all. But who’d do that? Especially now. Twice a day the ocean runs back the other way, retreating, assuming life on land is for the people. And the birds.

We walk along the high tide line, the damp sand delineated from the dry sand. On this border, a belt of small white crabs, overturned and dried out. Hundreds of brittle little ghosts that crumble to the touch. Dead either because the ocean left them behind — dropped them off and forgot to come back for them; or because one very forceful wave slammed them all out of existence. An extinction event in miniature.

My youngest finds an opening carved in the cliffside which he takes to be further proof of the dinosaurs. He points above us where a giant tree trunk is lodged in the crevasse. My husband asks which way we think the stump is going — was it washed ashore, getting deposited, or torn from once-roots, getting withdrawn? It’s one of his Unanswerables. Just a thought prompt, to get us each picturing the one way, and then the other.

A good exercise since beach walks are for questions, not answers.

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We drive home by the pumpkin patches of bygone field trips, past the farm where you can ride depressed ponies, past the rows of pines growing all together as if toddlers at a daycare for Christmas trees. This is all from the time of Young Kids, another epoch. Somewhere, on a parallel road, we are racing home, singing loudly to keep everyone awake, to get to cribs for nap time. Somewhere we are a car full of people who are years away from thinking about fractions.

As the landscape flicks past our windows, we all agree the hillsides look just like the pages of The Great Goat Chase, a picture book we bought when the kids were little from a bargain bin. It was $1.99 and we read it into oblivion. Each of the kids memorizing it in turns, like a rite of passage, as if a test to prove their familial citizenship.

The book is still somewhere in the house, equal parts tape and paper.

It feels possible we are the the only family who read this book? It wasn’t a bestseller, a staple of children’s literature. Something fated it to that bargain bin. An overrun? A typo? The message — about a bee who could get three goats out of a turnip field when so many larger animals couldn’t — might be banned present day for being too underdog-friendly, but it wouldn’t have been 20 years ago.

Even if other families read this book, we must be the only family who still refers to it regularly all these many years later. Any time we drive by rolling hills dotted with cows and a chimney-puffing house nestled in a valley’s arms. A window to so many bedtimes shared from the time when we were whole.

A page from our story and our story alone.

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The 8 days of my daughter’s visit go by a lot faster than other 8 day stretches we’ve recently lived. Throughout the week, my youngest repeats EIGHT DAYS over and over again, as if it’s a spell of perpetuity and this will ward off her departure.

He often works magic, but not this time. My daughter gathers up all that had bloomed on her floor, rolls it expertly and packs it away. She folds up that carry-on and I hear the violent zzzeeeepp of the zipper from downstairs. Case closed.

Because this is how visits work. They end.

I’d be happy to have her stay for another 8 days or 80 days, to tuck that suitcase deep in her closet, to move back into her drawers. So we can keep going on walks, stuffing her eyes with pink flowers and green leaves, stores to draw on in the gray. So we can keep talking about Every Single Thing.

But she has that whole Young Person’s Life to get back to, and that makes me happy too.

So we tell her we’ll miss her. That it’s better when she’s here because this is a secret we’re unable to keep.

And she flies off to return to her life by a different ocean.

Another blue space.

Jen.

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I don’t love to think of substack as just another social media but, alas: it is one. And it is therefore another little algorithm-driven monster, looking for likes and engagement on any given post and rewarding numbers. I’m so grateful for your eyes and attention here always. And if, after spending this time with me, you can leave a little heart or comment or forward this to someone, my little heart will spill over.❤️

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