By Bronwen Butter Newcott
Growing up, for one week every summer, our family of six left Washington DC for the beach. In the backseat of our dark green station wagon, my siblings and I used our fingers to draw invisible boundaries between seats. For that single week, my dad’s perfectly combed hair released to the wind, a little puffy, a little free. He wore a coral striped T-shirt and smooth tan flip flops, both of which only surfaced in beach houses. Every morning, my mom assumed her position in a folding chair at the edge of the water and sat for hours as her chest grew dark and more freckled.
At night my parents poured coconut cream and pineapple juice into the rental house blender like it was their every-evening routine. And I watched, mesmerized by this version of them that suggested they’d lived before I was born. Days were long enough to fill buckets with tiny rainbow-striped coquinas, sift through shells and pebbles for sea glass, and then line my treasures on the deck to show my mom, who’d tell me about hunting for coquinas with her mom.
This was a week of ease when my parents seemed to grow younger, my mom easy in an oversized cover-up, my dad flipping pancakes, while one of them would hand us a kite to fly. It was our time uninterrupted, when alone at the beach, we were a family of six.
Forty years later, our family still goes to the beach. This July we are not six, but 24, our largest count so far. The rituals have changed and as more adults fill the kitchen, we shuffle to find our rhythms. Happy hour at five or White Claws on the sand? A sit-down lunch together or self-serve? Donuts from the bakery or homemade protein pancakes? Everyone makes offerings.
Dinner works in a tidy rotation. Each couple takes a night and people go big: brown paper on the table for blue crabs with Old Bay, garlic ribs, pork shoulder that nearly sets a grease fire in the grill, cheese grits, and sliced peaches and melon from the farm stand, and even a chocolate layered pie with golden broiled marshmallows.
This summer, amid the rotating menus, I’m taking note of the constants. The uncles who burst into song whenever a kid passes, taunting them about the ice cream truck whose tinkling siren calls all day every day. The grandmother who sets her folding chair at the edge of the ocean so the waves rush her feet as the grandchildren come and go around her. Despite sunscreen, her chest and arms still brown and freckle in their old way. The ballroom dance lesson my dad still insists on—ballroom dance being an essential life skill—where three-year-olds and 80-year-olds cha-cha together. The sketch books, paints and markers that commandeer the kitchen table. The storms that flash, lighting even in the house and turn the ocean to rippling steel. Some summers a rainbow stretches a full arc, ocean to ocean, and we say, each time, it’s for us.
These years, I am the woman crouched on the deck naming the shells the kids have spread out in the sun.
It’s hard not to wonder, in murmurs or to ourselves, how much longer we will keep coming here together. What will happen when our parents grow older? When the kids move to college and beyond?
This summer two teenagers drive. The newest driver runs to the store multiple times a day, to pick up milk, a pink box of donuts, the conditioner everyone forgot. I am still unsure of his hands on the wheel. The older driver leaves only for lattes. And for the first time, they ask to go out one night, alone. They are old now. We’re unready.
How will we continue to carve out this week as the sands keep shifting? I don’t know. But even when we have to isolate cousins in every room of the house, even when we forcibly collect electronics or disagree about movies, even when we cannot stand the thought of another debate after dinner, this single week of co-living is a kind of belonging we have fought for. Through years of bucking and individuating, new marriages and job crises, toddlers and teenagers, we have kept coming. And now years in, stealing kisses from each other’s babies, working hard to make a nephew laugh, sitting head-to-head with a niece making decisions about college, we know why.
Our coming isn’t easy—from California, Virginia, Maryland, Eastern Europe, with a trail of kids in tow. But we come to make bridges. In close quarters, over meal after meal, the differences of our lives become clear. How tidy it would be to stay separate, to keep living apart. Instead, we come to the beach and live for a week together. Here we bridge ages. We bridge states. We bridge countries and social norms. We bridge political differences. We bridge parenting styles and our own ideals.
In some conversations, the bridges don’t quite reach. Voices grow hot. Someone storms out. And I think, this is finally it. But then, a brother circles back to the table, a sister says sorry, and we keep bridging. We have to. It’s how we find our ways back to each other, back to our dad’s salty hair and our own childhood stories, the memories no one else holds. It’s how we make paths for our kids to trek deeper into family, to better understand us and their roots. It’s how we teach them what Home is.
Summer after summer, during the hottest month of the year, we pack into a house, endlessly sweeping sand from the floors, to bridge, so we can keep coming Home.
Bronwen Butter Newcott writes poetry, nonfiction, and kids’ literature; her latest novel is Race to the Great Invention. She has an MFA in poetry from the University of Maryland, and lives in Southern California with her husband and three kids, though she travels across the country as much as possible to pack into various houses with her extended family. Find her monthly newsletter on Substack https://bronwenbutternewcott.substack.com/
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