“Remoted – Hybrid” – Day 836 (Wednesday) – beach house

On this date in 2013, Mom, Sis, the nieces, Moose, Winston, and I headed to the beach for a full week. We had rented a three-story house near Long Sands Beach in York, Maine. The lowest level was bedrooms, the main level was living and dining, and the third had a pool table and futons. It smelled musty and felt damp, like many beach houses do. There was room to spread out and it was fun. 

Long Sands Beach, York, Maine,
 June 22, 2013.

Three months earlier, I had moved back to Massachusetts from Tennessee, where the closest beach was an eight hour drive. It was thrilling to be living an hour from beaches again. 

The first evening at the beach house, we discovered the blinds in the living room were stuck in the raised position. The house next door was just a few feet away with windows unobstructed by blinds or curtains. Around suppertime, a woman exercised along with a show playing on the big screen TV in her living room. In her underwear. The way the furniture in our rental was situated, it faced the window with the stuck blinds. If she turned slightly, she would have seen us in our living room. So there we sat, laughing and trying to not look out the window, trying to not watch the lady in the underwear exercising in the house with no curtains. It was awkward and also funny.

The dogs were unimpressed with the beach. In the early morning until 8:00 am, dogs could be leash free in the beach, and the first morning there, my nieces and I took the dogs across the wooden bridge over the little stream, across the street to the beach. The air was cool and the waves were loud. The dogs lasted about 10 seconds off leash, turned and ran at top speed away from the water towards the street. My nieces and I chased after them. Luckily, there were people at the top of the stairs who caught them before they could go further and we could catch up. After that, Moose would refuse to cross the little wooden bridge, even when we weren’t going to the beach.

It was a fun week with many laughs. In the nine years separating then and now, so much has happened – three high school graduations, home purchases and moves, job changes and promotions, other vacations, not to mention all the crazy world events. 

It feels like an entire lifetime has happened between then and now. We've sometimes talked about staying at the beach again, but for less than a week. It just hasn't happened. Yet. Some day.