A Full Life is Full of Life: Farewell to a Child's Paradise

I’m feeling mighty selfish these days. My aging parents are making a huge, positive transition to a more simple life and all I can think about is loss. I’m about to lose all physical connections to my childhood paradise, the home where I grew up. Thanks to my parents’ hard work and my Mom’s Life List, my siblings and I enjoyed a wonderful and amazing childhood in a magical place called Browns Point.

Our days often started out by sleepily munching on Cheerios while watching sea lions frolic in the salty cove less than a hundred yards from the kitchen table. While it is not likely that they were the same sea lions that barked past midnight the night before from the shipping lane buoy far out in the middle of the channel, we blamed them anyway. Sounds can carry long distances on a quiet night over the still water.

Although my parents were very busy with careers, leaving before breakfast for a day of work in the city, to return many hours later in time for a hot dinner that was always put on the table by us kids, a big oak table set with eight sets of cutlery, napkins and 7 full glasses of milk (Mom doesn’t like milk), a table with a view of Caledonia Cove and all the creatures that lived above and below the surface of the briny sea.

Our childhood days were spent beach combing, lifting rocks to count the tiny crabs as they scurried to find a new hiding place. At low tide we would sneak up on gooey ducks, trying to grab their leathery necks before they could squirt us in the face with their gritty spit before digging down to safety. If we ran out of things to do, we might challenge each other to a fire building contest on the rocky beach, using only what we could find along the shore…and a couple of matches. In my foggy memory I’m not sure if those fires were parent sanctioned, or if they only took place when Mom and Dad were safely 50 miles away at their jobs in Seattle.

Weather permitting, we would take out one of the small boats to get a different view of the world. We might row down to the lighthouse to see who was playing at the park, or just float around near shore, heads hanging overboard, silently watching the flounder dart around on the sandy sea floor.
In the summer my brother would pack a lunch and take the rubber raft all the way out into the shipping lanes to ride the waves while they were still monstrous and churning from the giant international vessels coming in to port. From home, we younger kids would keep our eyes out for a large ship wake making its way to shore. If it looked like a doozy we might all dash down to the boat house to grab floating toys, splash into the water and ride the incoming surge of waves. Occasionally we would be rewarded with a screaming, bouncing wet ride that rivals a kiddy-roller-coaster, but more often the waves would be reduced to disappointing undulating lumps of water by the time they reached us.

On warm summer days we would cool off by swimming, splashing and floating upon the murky, seaweed ridden water while trying to dodge the stinging jelly-fish. Only once did one yellow jelly sneak up on me to wrap its tentacles around my ankle – the pain was indescribable, but the screaming and ear-piercing sobs were a pretty good indication of my discomfort. With the absence of the dreaded stinging creatures, we would still last only a few minutes in the bone-chilling water before we would be ready to bask in the sun on the warm sand.

During the cool gray Pacific Northwest days that are so common we might drag out the heavy black wet suits from the basement. We typically struggled for a half an hour to pull those tight rubbery pants and jackets on, and even longer to get them off once we were water-logged and wrinkled. We would be rewarded for wrestling the suits onto our bodies with hours of swimming and effortless floating in the cove without a single shiver. The lucky kid was the one who called dibs on the pants with no hole in the crotch. The unlucky would be wearing the split pants and would feel quite a shock upon entering the 55 degree water.

I could go on forever, but I know that life moves on. Although we will lose our old creaky house, our rocky beach and our endless view of the Puget Sound and islands, we won’t have lost everything. As I write this, I realize that I have fabulous memories that fill me from the bottoms of my barnacle-scraped feet to the tips of my sandy, salty hair. And I still have my Mom and Dad, who made this childhood happen, all snuggled up in their new cozy condo on the hill.