It was a balmy 4 degrees this morning when I left the house. Wind chill was something like 18 below. My kids acted like they had placed outside naked into the snow, when in fact they had thirty layers on. They reminded me of those kids from the Christmas Story.
Sometimes, I wonder about our choice to be here, in the middle. While both Hubs and I were raised in the Midwest, I had the luxury of living near the ocean for two years. And both of us spent some time on the coasts as kids, visiting family. There's just something about the ocean that calls to us.
And our kids have never seen it.
We are 14 hours away from the nearest beach, and that's the Gulf-- not even the ocean, really.
While there are definite pluses to our lives here (low cost of living, extremely well-educated community, our jobs) I feel sort of sad at times for the oceanic life my kids will never know intimately. About tides and the moon, and the smell that's stuck in your nose for a week. (Usually this a good smell, unless a horseshoe crab has beached itself.) About a day in the sand that didn't take a month of planning to create.
What would it be like to just "drop by" the beach?
These thoughts are definitely prominent as we dig out the car (again,) salt the driveway (again,) shop for bigger coats (again.) What would it be like to stand in the sun, in shorts, with my kids, in January?
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2 comments:
Oooh, ooh, I can answer. It would be... anticlimactic. And hot. And sweaty. And over-rated.
And after a while, you would LONG for the crisp coolness of a fall day and the wintery whiteness of a snow day. And you'd realize that the ten-minutes-away beach? You hadn't set foot on it in a year.
Or, maybe that was just us. :)
It sounds nice, doesn't it? But I have a hunch that Michelle is right, we'd probably long for the Midwest.
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