The Morning Mom Finally Saw the Ocean

“No,” she said. “Not in the dark. I’ve waited sixty years. I want to see it proper. In the morning, with the sun on it.”

The morning came up sunny. I knocked on Mom’s door at seven and she opened it already dressed.

She had on her lavender slacks and her white cardigan, the one she wore to church in the spring. She had done her short white curls the way she did them for funerals and weddings. She had Emma’s water shoes in her hand.

“I’m not wearing these yet,” she said. “I want to feel it first.”

The ladies were already in the lobby. Every one of them had on a sun visor and a bright flowered blouse, pinks and blues and purples, like a flower bed had gotten up and come along. A few of them had brought their phones. Phyllis had a whole plan for who would stand where.

We crossed the road together, all of us, a little parade of Methodist women from western Kansas and one diesel mechanic. Then we came over the top of the low dune, and there it was.

It was the biggest thing I have ever seen. I know that sounds simple. But I grew up looking at wheat to the horizon, and I thought I knew what big was. This was bigger. It went all the way out, gray-blue and shining, and there was no other side.

The beach was wide and flat, and the sand was packed hard near the water. The waves were small that morning, coming in low and easy and sliding up the sand in white lace and sliding back.

Mom stopped at the top of the dune. She did not say anything. She just held her purse in front of her with both hands.

“Mom?”

“Give me a minute,” she said. “Your father is supposed to be here for this, and I am telling him about it.”

So we gave her a minute. All thirty ladies stood still on that dune in their visors and did not say a word. I will remember that for as long as I live, that group of women standing perfectly quiet for an old friend.

Then Mom handed her purse to Phyllis and walked down the sand to the edge of the wet.

She bent down slowly and rolled her lavender slacks up to the middle of her calves, one leg at a time. I rolled my jeans up too, and I took off my shoes and stood there barefoot in my gray T-shirt. The sand was cold. It was late September, and the morning had not warmed up yet.

The ladies spread out on the sand behind us. A few of them held their phones up to take pictures. Phyllis was crying already, and nothing had even happened yet.

Mom reached for my hand. Her grip was strong. It was a farm wife’s grip, a woman who had hung wash on the line and carried buckets and held babies for sixty years.

“Don’t let go, Matthew,” she said.

“I won’t, Mom.”

“Emma says they knock you down.”

“Emma’s never seen one,” I said. “But I won’t let go.”

We walked in together. The first water slid up over her bare feet and she gasped at how cold it was and squeezed my hand so hard my knuckles cracked. Then it slid away again and pulled the sand out from under her heels, and she wobbled and laughed and held on.