These Sand Castles We Build

On Waves and Sand and Children Growing Up

I drive my 19-year-old daughter to an airport in central Florida so that she can fly home early from vacation and work at her new job in the city. It is early (for a vacation day), and the drive is quiet. The previous days flooding has mostly retreated into the soggy, sandy soil, but many of the ditches are still full to the brim, and puddles reflect another day’s stormy sky.

I park along the sidewalk at departures and get out, walk around the car. It is a tiny, quiet airport on a lazy summer morning. My oldest daughter is nearly as tall as me. I hug her and kiss her cheek, that same cheek that used to be so tiny and chubby but now is firming up under the cares of life, and I tell her to have a good flight, text us when she lands. Her 20-year-old brother is already at home, having opted to work for the entire week, also saving up for the coming year of college.

I pause before driving away and watch her walk into the airport wearing her comfortable travel clothes, her bag slung over her shoulder, hair pulled up and glasses on. She seems so at ease, so at home in the world.

Raising a child, teaching a child, watching a child age year by year . . . sometimes, now that we are where we are in the process, those years feel like castles we once built in the sand. The time, so much of it behind us, disintegrates, and then they’re off, building their own life, making their own friends, walking into airports on their own, going off to stay at the homes of college friends and entering the fringes of their own, new, previously unexplored lives.

And Maile and I have four younger children still at home, each at different phases of the same life cycle. And now a bookstore to care for. Life is racing ahead, kids growing up and leaving, the bedrooms in our house slowly emptying.

And we just keep building castles.

These are the times we find ourselves in.

---

Later in the day, there is a gap in the line of thunderstorms, and we hurriedly chuck our beach things into the back of the car and head for the water. The sand is flat and hard from the storms, like nearly-dried cement, and the waves are bigger than I’ve ever seen them in the Gulf. We laugh and run out into the loud, pounding surf, swim and float up over the crests and let the waves rush us towards the shore. Thunderclouds gather twenty miles, fifty miles, a hundred miles off shore.

“Careful!” I shout. “Don’t go out too far!”

But already our middle two are pushing their way further, out over the waves. They are strong swimmers. They no longer need me there to hold their hand.

I see our youngest daughter, seven years old, now sitting cross-legged on the beach beside a tiny little ditch that she has dug, just at the edge of where the waves can reach. I float to shore and trudge through the shin-deep water, my soft feet feeling every sharp shell in the sand. Closer still, and I can see her talking to herself, pretending.

At first when I arrive, she is embarrassed, but when I ask if I can help, she slides over, makes room for me, and we begin digging a moat and building a wall together. She tells me there is an evil queen in a neighboring castle who the people in our castle will eventually have to fight. And another waves approaches our little wall. And another.

I tell her I’m going further up the beach to build a castle the waves can’t reach. Would she like to join me?

No, she’s going to stay there, forced to quickly rebuild as each wave goes over the wall. So I stay and fight this futile fight with her, scooping the water out of the moat, rebuilding the wall, groaning and laughing when another wave comes and washes away our work.

Eventually, she hops up and runs into the water, so I go further up the sand and begin a new castle. This one with a deeper moat, higher walls, one that will live forever. I dig out the inside and build towers at the corners. I build roads inside of it and a house where we would live. And the waves spill closer.

Finally, I go sit in my beach chair and watch Maile and the kids where the five of them jump over waves, count them every so often (one . . . two . . . three . . . four . . . five), their little heads all that I can see, rising with each swell, sometimes dipping under the curling waves.

My daughter’s castle has been consumed, and now the waves grow closer to my own. But a mother and her son run over to the castle, not knowing I was the one who built it, and they take a handful of shells and decorate the walls, smiling to each other. The boy is little, maybe three or four, and he crouches down on chubby legs and points at the castle. The mother smiles and nods. They walk away.

A few moments later a couple nearly trips over the castle. The woman stops, crouches down, takes a few photos of the towers and the walls decorated with the shells left by the woman and her son. The two of them walk away.

Another wave rolls closer

I sit and watch.

But then I stand up and walk out through the waves, out to where Maile and our four children are laughing and shouting.

“Here comes another wave!”

“Look at the size of that one!”

“Watch out!”

My youngest daughter explains to me the best way to survive the largest of the waves, many of which are well over her head. She jumps and lifts her face towards the sky and laughs with delight as another one tries to knock her over.

And there we spend the evening, the sun disappearing behind the distant storm clouds, then peeking back out again, the day spinning towards its end.

“This is what separates artists from ordinary people: the belief, deep in our hearts, that if we build our castles well enough, somehow the ocean won't wash them away. I think this is a wonderful kind of person to be.”
― Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird