Excursions

It was nearly a year ago—it will be a year in April—when Kelly took her children and me to the New Hampshire seashore . It was my first time there; my family visits Cape Cod during the summers, and hence the only ocean I know is, though just down the coast, so many miles different; the beaches there are much larger, much more a part of the local identity than in Plymouth, where the thin, hot strip of sand and shallow water is crowded against the hot asphalt of the cramped parking lot and hot asphalt street lined with beach houses in various states of repair. It is, of course, always dangerous to some degree to travel with someone with post-natal depression, more so in retrospect when she tells you she can’t remember any of it, none of those three months when she talked, with slightly manic desperation, so much to you in the hot, full van; and it was an unprecedented decision. One day Kelly decided she wanted to go to the beach and I happened to be available; I complied to her request that I help her handle her four small children. Isaac, her month-old son, swaddled in a sling, held close to her torso, and Grace with her tiny hand in mine, Kelly and I went to the seashore.

Of course, Kelly’s mood was not far missed by mine, plunged for some reason into a nostalgic depression of fourteen. We stood in the sea spray beneath the beating sun all afternoon; Grace encountered the ocean and promptly got my shirt soaking wet, Emma raced the waves and Alex tasted the ocean. We trooped around southern New Hampshire, stopping at gas stations to buy gallons of water for refilling the water bottles and to use their tiny bathrooms. The drive there felt interminable even to me, especially after the first, tantalizing smell of the salty sea air wafted through, accompanied by the cries of the gulls, the open windows; and then, crusty with salt, pockets filled with seashells and shoes with sand, we drove back the same way to the cool April evening which seemed so sweet and full of the promise of imminent summer.