It’s Monday, Labor Day and the rest of the vacationers are nowhere in sight. Sleeping in, perhaps. Hungover, no doubt. You’d be sleeping in too if not for the alarm on your cell phone, set to roust you out early enough to get a head start on the rest of them.
There seems to be only one other person awake besides you, a woman standing between the heavy stilts that support her beach rental. Indeed, the only homes this close to the water that managed to survive Ike are the stilted ones, set at least eight feet high. This is the kind you rented and it’s what the woman rented whose now outside, calling her dog. The two cars parked under her rental look packed, poised and ready to put an end to the long weekend. She calls the dog. From this distance, it sounds like the name is Lobo or Hobo and when you finally see the object of her attention you think how fitting the latter name would be. A tiny, white fluff scurries from around the nearest house and then stands about a hundred yards away, ears perked, tail wagging. Even from the distance of three houses and two floors up, you see the dog’s expression. And when the woman repeats her summons, Hobo bounds toward her, bouncing his way through the bushes to run circles around her legs. She carries her coffee cup back upstairs with tiny Hobo tight at her heels.
There are a few cars already vying for position on the beach. There’s even an early bird fisherman wading hip deep in the surf, his pole slanting downward as he tries catching the silvery carp you saw flashing across the water last evening. You smile as you recall the one, how it took six hops up into the air before abandoning its earthbound dream. You remember how you laughed, wondering what could prompt such abandoned glee in the life of a fish.
You hear the neighbors stirring, filtering out onto the deck for some quiet conversation before their gaggle of children wake up. You’ve already decided that they are a strange group. Not by the fact that they have a herd of small children between the handful of women you’ve seen. But by the fact that there are no men; at least not any frequent ones. You remember seeing men only three times the entire weekend: once to fill the ice chest on the deck when they first arrived, another to cook on the grill downstairs and a third to empty the ice chest on Sunday night. But even during these chance sightings, none of the women were present. You recall seeing the children on the beach, romping through the surf while the women guarded from the shore. But even then, the men were nowhere in sight. From your place of silent observation you’ve concluded that, aside from the obvious coupling required to produce the gaggle of children, there is no gender interaction in the adjoining beach house and you wonder whether it’s some kind of cult.
You’re grateful for the fact that one of the women has yet to join this morning’s gathering – the one with the laugh so ridiculous you actually wonder whether she’s been pretending all weekend. It’s sort of a hee-haw guffaw that makes you laugh every time you hear it. But not for the same reasons. You think of tomorrow, of all the things waiting for you back home. And you’re torn between a desire to stay here, sitting alone on the deck watching the sea move in and out, the pelicans swooping low over the surf as you listen to the cadence of the gulls chattering in the distance, or to go back home, return to your “normal” existence, leaving this weekend as some perfect memory.
As it turns out, nothing is perfect - at least not forever. You hear the neighbor join the others on the porch and her goofy laugh drives you inside. Time now to shake the last of the sand out of your clothes, pack up your own two dogs, your husband and your son and head on back to life.
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