Treasure

There are times, when something happens to temporarily turn my life upside down, that I need to take myself back. Back, back… to my thirteenth summer – to some of the sweetest memories I own. I pull them out of my memory and examine them, turning them over and over like a miser checks and rechecks his golden coins. These snapshots in time are almost too precious to describe – as if the mere exercise of putting words to the experience will dim the memory somehow.

It’s the first week of August, and my extended family has all gathered at the lake. After 18 holes of golf, my dad and my uncles sit in a semi-circle on aluminum webbed lawn chairs, laughing and smoking Lucky Strikes while my mom and my aunts work to prepare a barbeque. My cousins and my sister and I go down to the beach. Partly, this is done to avoid being around the kitchen where we’re likely to be called in to do some random chore, but partly because the sun, sand and water call us so urgently that it’s as if we have no choice.

My cousins are older than me – eighteen, nineteen and twenty one. The girls are sitting on the side of the pier, their tan legs swinging to and fro, their painted toes skimming the surface of the water. Their beach towels are arranged in a line, punctuated with plastic squeeze bottles of Sea & Ski and three transistor radios, all tuned to Johnny Mathis singing “Chances Are.” They are like exotic butterflies to me, colorful and beautiful, but not belonging to my world.

My boy cousins are roughhousing in the water – racing each other to the raft and back and noisily dunking each other. They, too, are older that me, but act like rambunctious puppy dogs with their splashing and good natured joking with one another.

I’m on the periphery, laying face down on my green and black striped beach towel near the midsection of the pier. The air is filled with the scent of the suntan lotion and the sound of displaced water as one of the boys cannonballs off the raft. As I lay there sunbathing, I peek through the slats of the pier, lazily count the minnows swimming by and the occasional strands of seaweed floating near the piling. The water is clear and I can see the sand, with it’s meringue like peaks and valleys. I want to touch the lake bottom then, to lay the palm of my hand against the sand or trace my finger along the indentations. Instead, I take it all in – every sound and scent, every moment being stamped and saved into my memory. How could I have known back then that times like this would be a salve against whatever came my way? I am so grateful for my childish foresight. This moment – suspended in time, has never lost its luster or its effect on my soul. It has helped define the essence of me.