This morning, back on Beach of My Heart. I smiled at the memory of the driftwood log. Then blinked, and laughed out loud because I realized it was real.

Time doubles back on itself in odd and beautiful patterns here. Always so much the same. New joys adding bright threads that somehow match perfectly with the comfortably worn tapestry we’ve woven in bits and pieces almost every summer for more than half a century. Gaps in the fabric where what’s been lost over the years shows up vividly by its very absence.

It must have been only two or three summers that our log was right here in this spot. Our dad – Nurn, we called him, although this was probably even before that nickname – found it, swept far up above the tidal line by some midwinter storm. Brought the two of us, Tiny Me and Big Sis, to see it.

He was a man with an incredible instinct for spinning love into magic. So when he took out the little Swiss Army knife he always carried, and showed us how to carve our initials, we knew it made us part of something that would be here for years and years. Maybe forever.

I feel sure that the log was there the following summer, with our initials still traceable in its salty silver sheen. We added to our marks. Carved ourselves deeper into the foreverness of the beach.

Was it there again the next summer, and the next? I don’t know. The small things are the big things, as the saying goes, and it feels to me like this went on for years. All I know for sure is that one year the log was gone. Another winter, another wave. We searched but never found it.

That never stopped me from seeing it, though, nestled into the same-but-changing curve of seagrass far up the dune. And with it, us too. Little girls, big Nurn, tradition and magic here forever.

Then this morning, in this place, the happy past made real again by some new wave. Not the same log, of course. I didn’t even check for our marks. The old log was much bigger… or was it just that I was smaller? Regardless, Big Me knows that a summer of nearly fifty years ago doesn’t really come back.

Which is where the new joys come in, like I said. In a minute, I’ll finish writing this and go back up the sandy stairs to the same rented cottage, where I’m staying just for this weekend with my mother and stepdad to help them move in for their long vacation. Dave, my stepfather of ten years, loves it here as much as we do. He never got to meet Nurn, but he knows all the stories. He and my mom don’t make it down to the beach anymore. Just looking at it is enough for them. It’s that special.

The whole bunch of us will come back next weekend to stay for two weeks. My nephews think they know this beach better than anyone. I tell them nope, I’ve got decades on them here. Then they show me something new, something they love that I’ve never seen before.

That’s how this place works. We’re part of it for always; my dad wanted his ashes scattered here. And yet the things we love here wash away. Sometimes they come back beautiful and different. Sometimes it’s just the memories that stay and get passed on to new hearts. I guess someday they’ll all get taken by the waves when none of us are left to remember.

Sitting here on the log, watching the waves now, I think that’s a pretty good place to end up.

Happy Father’s Day. May your remember with joy the men whose magic and love shaped your life, whoever they were. ❤️