the beach

I love going to the beach. I am lucky I don't live that far from it. I haven't been this summer though, which is really kind of silly since we only live half an hour away. A fun thing to do at the beach is camp, it's less dirty, but when you get home, it seems you're still dusting sand off your derriere (and everything you took with you) a week later.

One summer when I was eighteen and my sister was nineteen, we invited two of our friends (they were sisters too) to go camping at the beach with us. I remember my oldest brother was trying to spoil our fun and he told my Dad that us girls shouldn't be allowed to go by ourselves, luckily my Dad disagreed with him. My Dad just gave us some rules to follow to keep us safe. So my sister and I packed up our car, I brought a couple of books that I found in my mom's bookcase, and we went to pick up our friends to drive to the beach. We set everything up fairly easily. About that time, it became dark. So we ate and I brought out one of my mom's books, which was a collection of classic short stories. I began reading the book out loud and we enjoyed it so much that we took turns reading. What better stories to read than Edgar Allan Poe around a campfire? That night it rained lightly and I got up early. I wanted to show my girls' camp prowess of getting the fire started. Unfortunately, we left the wood out in the open and it was wet. I tried for an hour to get the fire started and a guy in his mid-twenties walked by and saw what I was doing. He walked by an hour later and saw I was still working on the wet firewood and having no luck. He stopped and asked if I needed help and I told him I didn't think I'd ever get a fire going because the wood was wet. He left and came back with some of his dry wood and started my fire for me. The girls came out of the tent an hour later and I told them I how I started this nice roaring fire just for them. They all laughed at me and said they heard a man start the fire and they asked me if I acted helpless in my little white nighty. (I was wearing sweats, not a nighty, in case you're wondering!) So much for my girls' camp prowess! We had all ages of men in the campground walk by our setup, smile, and wave. They were probably all doing their duty to make sure we were safe and had what we needed, after all isn't it just men who like to camp and drag the women in their lives out to wallow in the dirt? We had a great weekend, in fact it was fabulous. We made sand turtles and castles on the beach. We waved to cute guys and giggled, we laid in the sand and talked about the cutest boys we knew, we saw a skywriter in a plane and we teased each other about who we thought would write each others names up there, and we fell asleep on the sand and sunburnt ourselves to a crisp. We can't forget the classics that we read to each other in the evening.

We always meant to do it again, but we never did. My sister got married the next summer, our friends went off to college, my family moved, and I went to beauty school. I actually never saw those girls again, but hope they remember our campout with fond memories. Maybe they'll teach their daughters to cover the wood at night in case of rain and if all else fails, put on a white nighty and act like a helpless girl!