The Feel of Being

Golly, just look at her. The little girl with her arms outstretched, the smile on her face, the joy emanating from her little body.

That’s my mom, sometime around 1925 or so. She would have been…let’s see…eight, maybe?

We can only know our parents as our parents, right? It’s impossible, really, to know them apart from that relationship. But after my father died, and then five years later my mother followed him, there came a shift, as if, now they were gone, I could see them differently, see more of them. It’s hard to explain.

I mean, here in this photo is my mom as a little girl with the sun glinting on her bathing cap and the warm Gulf of Mexico waters sloshing around her, and she looks like so much fun, I wish I could have played with her. That we could have been contemporaries. That I was the girl behind, holding her. That we would have laughed and shouted together and chased each other into the waves. How crazy is that?

The girl holding her is a cousin, Joyce, and behind Joyce is my mom’s mom, my grandmother. Beside my grandmother are Joyce’s parents, Lilla and Bursot. This is along the strand of Florida Panhandle beach that is now called Miramar. When this picture was taken — and now I’m wondering who took it? — the area was utterly remote, without even electricity.

I’m betting my grandfather took the picture with one of his Brownie cameras. I’m betting he stood back, his long legs angled slightly, feet settling in the sugar-white sand, an onshore breeze cooling his sunburned face, peered into the lens, and said, “Everybody say CHEESE!” and my mom smiled a big smile with her little white teeth and threw her arms out in a wide welcome to the delight of the summer day, the place, the sunshine, her cousin’s skin against hers, the clear water and the sharp smell of sea creatures, the salt on her lips, the feel of the sand, the feel of the sun, the feel of being alive, the feel of being alive, the feel of being alive, of being alive, of being alive.

Of being so very much alive.