Immediately after college graduation, having then worked several whole days at my new full-time job, I took a tiny Cape Air puddle jumper from Boston to my grandparents’ vacation house on the island of Martha’s Vineyard so that I could get some much-needed weekend R&R.  My Grandma Marion was waiting at the airport clad in a sun hat; she had decided that we would arrive a day earlier than my grandfather since I was now an important working woman without any paid time off.  The decision – but definitely not the sun hat – was uncharacteristic; I had inherited my grandmother’s gift of eschewing unnecessary life skills such as “Situational Awareness” and “Directional Navigation” in favor of more important qualities like Knowing the Exact Right Moment for an Iced Tea, and so my Grandpa Mel was usually responsible for all matters related to keeping us from wandering off of cliffs.

It was so uncharacteristic that my grandfather did everything he could to prepare us for the perils of 24 whole hours without him, including leaving a stack of newspapers folded to a myriad of articles on the hurricane that was expected to hit the island sometime between my arrival and his own.

“Oh, it’s just a little hurricane,” my grandmother said with a wave of her hand.

“That’s right,” I said, sagely, having also not bothered to read the photocopied versions of the articles my grandfather had mailed to me.

After lunch, shopping, iced teas, a beach walk, dinner, and dessert, we stopped at the island grocery store to get a few crucial foodstuffs: seltzer water (the vodka was already at the house), cherries, and bagels with lox.

“Would you like any jugs of water?”  The cashier asked, pointing to a rapidly-diminishing flat near the entrance.  Outside, dark clouds rolled across the sky.

“We have seltzer,” I said.

“But…for the hurricane?”  The cashier asked.

“We’ll take a small one,” my grandmother said to get us out of there and home to our cherries.

It had started to rain as we pulled onto the gravel driveway.  The phone rang the moment the key was in the door; it was my Grandpa Mel.

“The news said you should fill up the bathtubs and turn over the deck furniture,” he said.

“We already bought a jug of water,” my grandmother told him.  “This hurricane is too much work.”  She hung up the phone.

We poured ourselves a couple of little vodka sodas and toasted the little hurricane and our own little selves.  The phone rang again, although it was hard to hear with the water pounding against the side of the house.

“Bathtubs and furniture,” my grandpa said.

“Go out and turn something over, Amanda,” she said, “so he stops calling.”

I slid open the deck door and was immediately overcome by nature.

“This is very inconvenient,” I thought, as my underwear filled with rain.  There were four chairs on the deck, and I powered forward, bent at the waist, my hair whipping my cheeks as I fought against the wind.  It took either five minutes or five hours to turn three chairs.  I gave up on the fourth; if the ocean wanted it so badly, it could have it.

I crawled back to the deck door on my knees, only to find it locked.  I pounded on it for another five minutes/five hours until my grandmother appeared.

“What on earth were you doing out there?”  She said.

“Turning over the deck furniture,” I said, dripping onto the carpet.  “Why was the door locked?”

“You should always lock the door when you are home alone, Amanda,” she lectured.  “It’s dangerous.”

“Good point,” I said.

“How was it?”  She asked.

“A little hurricane-y,” I said.

The sun was shining early – but not too early because we were on vacation – the next morning.  We flipped over the deck chairs, complimenting my decision to leave the fourth, which was exactly where it had been the night before.

“What are we supposed to do with that jug of water?”  I asked.

“Save it for the next hurricane, I suppose,” my grandmother said.

“Smart,” I said, as we ate our bagels under blue skies.

It’s Wednesday, and Erica and I are on the beach sitting on our chairs, E in the sun and me under the beach umbrella.  We are true beach people today.  We have a cooler filled with cream cheese and colossal black, pitted olive sandwiches (a tomato and cream cheese for me), peaches, carrot sticks, and Cokes.  We have beach towels.  We had a wonderful location close to the sea with a clear view in front of us, now obstructed by a middle-aged woman with a red rinse on her brown hair and a middle-aged man with a very large bald spot in the middle of his dark brown hair.  He’s watching a young girl in a bikini walk up from the water’s edge.  His wife is reading, oblivious to his lecherous heart and middle-aged feelings of inadequacy.  The bikini is out of view.  He picks up a book, too.  So much for the view!

A group of men at the water stand and chat.  One has a deep heh, heh, heh laugh, like a machine gun but not as loud.  Two babies play in the sand.  They’re wearing hats – one is probably Mom’s red hat, deeply brimmed.  The other baby’s hat is flowered with a rolled brim.  They’re digging a deep hole.

The sun is bright, strong, sparkling on the green-grey waves of the ocean.  It’s breezy here in the shade of the umbrella.  A seagull just flew over, flapping its wings, looking for lunch.  But ours is in a plastic Playmate cooler by Igloo.  The seagull has no chance with our cream cheese-olive-or-tomato sandwiches on white.  Sorry, seagull.