Time To Go

My grown-up self is busy packing for our trip home to the prairie while my inner toddler is throwing a full-on, epic tantrum.

I don’t want to go.

The kids and I crossed the Bourne Bridge on July 11, and it feels like that was yesterday. Tomorrow we’ll spend our last day at the beach — we choose the oceanside for our final fling — and then we’ll head back west.

In years past I was ready to leave. Tired from too much company and too little structure. But this year was different. The babyman was just old enough to be able to keep up with the pace of late nights, afternoons in the water and dinners in the gloaming.

We ate, shopped, celebrated and met our deaths in the cold waters of the Atlantic a thousand times only to recover and do it all again the next day. It was harmonious, much like our holidays this year. I even enjoyed my week parenting the kids sans their father, who stayed behind for a week to get some work done. The girl and the boy and I, we managed. We even drove more than 1,000 miles together, us three, and we did just fine on our own.

I turned 40 here, salt on my skin and sand in my bathing suit. I held my daughter’s hand in the surf as she instructed me on how to ride the giant waves. I turned to her, a wry smile on my face and said, “Darling, I’ve been doing this for 30 years.”

And so I have.

Today in the car the girl voiced her twin yearning to stay here and to go home, and I reminded her that this place will be here next year.

So it will. But I understand her desire to stay near the water. Quietly, her father and I fantasize about living here for a year, camping out for 12 months to see what the ocean looks like in the wintertime. With every fiber of my being, I don’t want to go home.

However, it is time to go. And my grown-up self will dutifully pack our bathing suits and souvenirs to take home to the flatlands. I’ll hide the shells in a suitcase cranny and find them months later. I’ll put the saltwater taffy within arm’s reach for treats on the long, long ride home.

But the little girl in me will weep for every mile between her and the seashore.