The Morning Mom Finally Saw the Ocean

We stepped out a little farther, until the water was swirling around her ankles. A wave came in, a little one, and broke right in front of us and rushed up around our legs, cold and quick and full of foam.

And my mother laughed. Out loud. Head back. Like a girl. I had not heard her laugh like that since before Dad died, and maybe not for a long time before that.

Then she stood there with the water going out around her ankles and she listened to it. She closed her eyes. I thought she was praying, and maybe she was.

When she opened her eyes, she said it. Not to me. Out to the water.

“Oh, Don,” she said. “It sounds like the wheat. You told me it would sound like the wheat, and it does.”

I did not understand at first. Then the next wave came in and went out, a long slow rush, and I heard it.

If you have ever stood at the edge of a ripe wheat field on a windy evening in June, you know that sound. The whole field moving at once. A long whisper going away from you and coming back.

Dad had never seen the ocean either. He was just guessing. But he had guessed right, and he had told her, and she had carried that for sixty years until she could check.

I could not say anything. I just held on to her hand.

Behind us on the sand, I heard Phyllis say, “Oh, June.”

Then I heard Doris, who sings alto in the choir, start to sing, very softly, “Shall we gather at the river,” and one by one the rest of the ladies came in, standing on the sand in their sun visors, singing about water to a woman standing in the ocean for the first time in her life.

When we finally came up out of the water, Mom went to her bag on the sand and took something out wrapped in a dish towel. It was a pint canning jar, one of her own, with a two-piece lid. She had carried it fifteen hundred miles in her suitcase.

“Hold my hand again,” she said.

We walked back down to the edge, and she bent and let the next wave fill the jar. She screwed the lid down tight and wiped the outside on her cardigan.

“For your daddy,” she said. “He’s going to get his ocean too.”

Two long days later, we got back to the church parking lot after dark on a Saturday night. Kelly was there with the kids. Emma ran to the bus door before it was all the way open.

“Did you hold onto him?” Emma said. “In the waves?”

“The whole time,” Mom said. “You were right, honey. They try to knock you down.”

Phyllis took the best picture from one of the ladies’ phones and had it printed at the drugstore in town, a big one, eight by ten.

It was the moment the wave came in. Mom laughing with her mouth wide open, her lavender slacks rolled up her calves, her white cardigan, her hand in mine. Me in my gray T-shirt, barefoot, looking at her and not at the camera.

Phyllis pinned it up on the church bulletin board in the narthex, right outside the sanctuary doors, next to the prayer list and the potluck sign-up sheet. Underneath it she wrote on an index card: June Ostrander, age 81, Myrtle Beach. Her first time.