Into the ocean....

So my mother has been bothering me all week to come down to the beach.

Funny thing about my mother and I. She constantly nags me to do things and I frequently refuse to do them just because she has told me to do them. The object lesson is that I would have done these things has she not nagged me to do them and she should therefore be modifying her behavior. How's that working for me? Well, let's see. I'm coming up on 36 years and there's no end in sight for the nagging. There's this teenie tiny little optimistic part of me that still believes that some day she will see that this is all an exercise in behavior modification and will modify her behavior, but the rest of me knows that there is a much greater chance that I will be identified as a divine entity and a religion of millions will be formed around me. (Be sure to get on board early...)

I'm not a beach person. I have red hair and freckles. I look at a picture of the sun and I get burned. Even before my father was diagnosed with melanoma, I was skin cancer waiting to happen. Now, I am just 80 times more so. Why on earth would I go to the beach? Seriously??? She knows all these things about me?

I did wear my bathing suit while we were on the Cape. Every morning, my nephew and I would take and outdoor shower together (I'd keep my bathing suit on until he was done); it would be almost impossible to get him out ~ he loved the water so much. He, by the way, is not a beach person either. He just doesn't like the sand.

So my father was driving down Thursday morning to take my sister, my nephew and me back to my parents house so we could fly back to Texas on Friday. There was a sign at the local public beach that advertised beach yoga, Wednesdays, 6-7pm, $10, bring a towel. My sister and I decided we would go on our last night. I though it was a little dubious, since high tide was right around that time and there wouldn't be a whole lot of beach.

Anyway, we walked down and sure enough, someone had written on the sign that the class had been moved to "First Encounter Beach" (A little know fact that the Mayflower made a few stops on Cape Cod before settling in at Plymouth Rock) We were on foot and that beach was definitely a drive away, so we decided to walk back towards the house on the beach.

I had kind of already decided that I was going to hit the water after yoga anyway, but I announced to my sister that I was going in as soon as we hit the private beach belonging to the neighborhood where our cottage was.

In I went, fully clothed in a tank top and shorts, leaving house keys in my shoes on the shore. The water was amazing as the tide came in, a mixture of the bath water temperature bay and the cold water coming in from the ocean. It's hard to explain the freedom of floating in the water with saline creating even more buoyancy than any pool and easy up and down of the incoming waves. You lay back and stare at the sky or lightly tread water with your arms while floating your toes above the surface. My sister soon joined me, seeing me smile and laugh for the first time in days.

This is why we come on these horrible vacations, we decided. For these few moments when everything seems perfect in the universe. When even the effects of gravity don't touch us ~ forget every other life stress. You get to forget everything else and just enjoy the rocking of the water.

We stayed in the water that night until it got too cold and we had to head back to the cottage. And we tried to hold onto the ocean feeling as long as we could....