The Week At The Gulf

June, and a station wagon full of noise

We drove down the second week of June in two cars. Earl and me in the Buick with Kim’s crew when her van’s air went out, and Kim behind us with the rest.

Have you ever had four children under ten in a car for fourteen hours? I had forgotten. Dear Lord, the questions. Are we there. Is that the ocean. That’s a lake, baby. Is THAT the ocean. That’s a pond. Is a pond smaller than the ocean. Yes. How much smaller.

Rosie rode most of the way in my lap once we stopped for lunch and she decided Grandma was softer than the car seat. Four years old, from Minnesota, who had never laid eyes on these loud cousins until the parking lot of a Cracker Barrel in Alabama.

She was shy at first. Hid in my skirt. By the second rest stop she was holding her girl cousin Hannah’s hand and telling her about a dog they did not have.

I watched that in the side mirror. Two little girls who were strangers at breakfast, holding hands at a gas pump by suppertime, because somebody finally put them in the same place.

That alone was worth nine thousand dollars. And we had not even seen the water yet.

I had done one thing I did not tell anybody about ahead of time.

I had ordered seven t-shirts. Bright teal, the color of the water in the brochure. Ordered them from a woman at church who does the printing, in seven sizes, from a 4T for Rosie up to a youth large for Kim’s oldest.

On the front of each one it just said, in plain white letters, THE COUSINS, and under that, GULF 2026.

I handed them out the first morning on the porch. The kids thought they were the greatest thing anyone had ever given them. They put them on over their pajamas. Rosie would not take hers off to swim and we had to let her wear it in the water the first day until it was soaked.

Seven children in matching teal shirts, tearing down a boardwalk toward the Gulf of Mexico, screaming with the joy of it.

Earl stood at the top of the walk with his hand over his eyes against the sun, watching them go.

“Look at that,” he said. “Just look at that.”