Discovering Your Summertime Happy Place

I've never been a beachy person. I don't know how much of it is from having a mother who detested sand or from not having anything more romantic to frolic in but Holly Beach.

I've tolerated the sand. I've enjoyed a good swim and a sandy hot dog, or two.

I've even enjoyed the beach. A summer has never gone by without a splash in the surf and sand.  I've made sure my children ate watermelon in the sand and collected buckets of seashells.

But I've never been one to stand and look out at the ocean and breathe with contentment.

The expanse of the ocean (and I've stood at both at the Atlantic and the Pacific) gives me a deep unsettling gulp in the middle of my belly. It's overpowering, overwhelming. It's one thing that reminds me that---as much as I deny it---I rather like being in control and the ocean reminds me ...threateningly...that I am not in control.

My father taught my brother and me to swim at an early age. It was both our parents' wish. My mother not only hated sand but she didn't rate water much higher. Still, as proof of fate, she met this carefree lifeguard/competitive swimmer/ instructor at the public swimming pool and he became my father. I've known how to swim all my life. I learned how in the safety of my father's arms.

But from a safe distance, my mother's cautious voice reminded me how wide and far and powerful water was. So I've never felt completely free at the beach. Comfortable? yes. Guarded? yes.

Yet I was always romantically curious about the souls who visited the beach for medicinal purposes. And I was always slightly envious of family stories about annual summers spent at beach houses. My parents preferred to head West and took us through the desert and over the mountains and into the sunset.

Maybe that's why I've never been a very beachy sort of person.

Yet lately...the older I grow...the beach appeals to me. It beckons me in a mystical way. Perhaps I'm being brain-pooled by all those Facebook posts. Or maybe it's because a little blue bird twitters about lovely freeing adventures by the seashore.

Or maybe it's how casual and effortless a walk becomes when you're clocking steps between a pier and nothingness.

 

Or maybe it's how nice it is to pretend you're a bum along with everybody else.

Or maybe it's the innate love I see my girls have for the beach. One of their favorite beach activities is to seek seashells (and baby crabs) by the seashore with flashlights into the late night hours.

Or it could be how one can take a free week on the sand and literally sit between two worlds. And nobody cares where you go or where you've been or if you fall asleep instead. It's a perfect vacation.

At any rate, I find myself Pinterested into an awareness of the love other people have for the beach and the sand and open air sunsets. I'm more open-minded that maybe the beach is a part of summer that I'm only now beginning to appreciate.

Or perhaps it's as simple as this sign says: "Some people see more in a WALK on the BEACH than others see in a trip around the world."

And that's really all a Happy Place needs to be to make one perfectly happy, isn't it?

Join me for a sit this summer?

 

{This was not Louisiana, folks. It was Florida. We have another trip planned to the Gulf sometime soon. Sorry for any false advertising. }