There is suffocating heat. And stickers. Sand spurs I think they’re called. There is some sort of green waxy round stuff growing up here and there in the sand instead of grass. I am running around in my cotton underwear with the ruffles around the leg holes, and I am content. Beside me is my still young father, shirtless and sound asleep in the summer shade of the scrub oaks that hold up his hammock. He’s sleeping so soundly that he’d not notice if I wandered off, but there’s no chance I’ll do that. Mother is on the porch with the friends who’ve come down here to stay in the Corte family cottage on Perdido Bay, and she’s probably got a firm eye on me as I meander in the sand.

I am two, and my sister is not yet born. But wait, this can’t be correct. We didn’t even live near the water when I was two. Not till I was eight, and we lived ON the water then, on Mobile Bay. This image is real though, as both my younger sister and I remember this beach trip. We were with the Smiths, or the Joneses, I can’t remember which. I’ve seen photographs of some of these summer vacations, and probably my memories are actually parts of several different occasions, but whether or not the memories are accurate as to time and place, who knows. Or cares. The memory is all that’s important.

I was there, even though you no doubt wished I hadn’t been. You were eight, and I was six. We were with the Smiths AND the Joneses, and don’t you remember anything right? Oh, whatever. Anyone want to know what really happened? Didn’t think so.

I can still see the rusty pump on the old well in the back, and the feel the rough rusty screens on the porches that surrounded this house. Those old metal screens would crumble when you touched them, which I loved to do to my mother’s annoyance. I can see us entering the house for the first time, opening up all the windows and rolling up the blinds to let in the sun and fresh air. I can smell the musty  cots we slept on and hear them squeak , as surely as I can see the kitchen water brown and smelly as it came out of the tap after months of disuse. Did we drink that stuff? 

Out front the shallow water licks at the beach and makes a soft rhythmic sound, backdrop to the squeals of children eager to get in the warm salty water. The sound of an outboard motor in the distance distracts us from my father barking the “rules”  but he manages to instill sufficient fear in us as he explains the dangers of disobeying his instructions. The hardest rule to follow is the one about not swimming for an hour after eating. Somehow parents always managed to sneak in an afternoon nap along with this rule.

Lots of laughter from both parents and children all mixed in together, the women unloading groceries such as soda crackers, condiments for hot dogs, peanut butter and Bama jelly, coca-cola for the children and beer for the adults. The kitchen is off to one side in a big room, and the beds are on the other side of the same room. There is a dining table, if you can call it that. More like an indoor picnic table.

There was a bedroom off the main room where all the children slept. Can’t you remember those silly negligees the women wore back then? It’s a wonder they weren’t accused of wife swapping with those outfits on. And the porch was only on the front of the house. The rusty screens you remember were on our hundred year old rental house on Mobile Bay. Get it straight, will you please!

There are images of wet bathing suits, rubber flip flops, sand-filled sneakers, and hot sandy wet dogs, all mixed in with the images of black rubber inner tubes, the size that could only have been inside a tractor tire, and an old wooden flatboat, pulled up to the beach and emptied of its treasure for the night.

Oh, my god. Those inner tubes. They were huge. Daddy sold fertilizer, so he must have gotten them from the farmers he called on in Baldwin County. Had those big air nozzles that stuck you in awkward places, and they were too big for a small child to do much more than hold on. Ours would always have a square pink patch somewhere. If I close my eyes I can still smell the rubber of those big tubes.

And the flat boat. Do you not remember going floundering at night in those boats? The sloshing around in the shallow water, up to your knees in seaweed and god knows what else – in the dark? Looking for a little oval shaped outline in the sandy bottom – that try as you might you couldn’t gig before it scooted away.

Other images of parents playing bridge and singing songs like My Little Lindy Lou or K-K-K-Katie, Beautiful Katie, you’re the only G-G-G-Girl that I Adore-and other songs from my parents era during the second world war. Popcorn is a favorite treat along with boiled peanuts. There’s no television and no radio in this house. In the car we listen to the radio, but once we arrive at the beach house there is just conversation and the sound of nature to fill the silence.

Mother and daddy sang two-part harmony when we were riding in the car going on trips, just to keep us quiet I suspect. When we were with other families we sang songs like “Skinnamarinkidinkidink, skinnamarinkidoo. I… love… you…”which we could sing for hours and hours, till our parents would do anything to shut us up. And don’t start telling about how sick you got eating boiled peanuts that night during the big storm. Just spare us, please.

The parents in these images are vibrant and whole, strong and comforting. They can be trusted to set limits for us, and often do just that -- to our dismay. Then those children who are sent to bed too early, too excited to sleep, have to be scolded and shushed countless times before finally drifting off to sleep in this strange old house.

Knowing my father, tomorrow morning will begin by his too energetic wake up – “Come on, get up and get your clothes on –we’re going floundering”…or fishing, or sailing or some other thing. Always wanting to make sure that no one misses an “experience” of life as he had known it growing up in Mobile and “over the bay.” He’ll have us gigging flounder before sunup, and don’t bother wailing over having to step on the slimy seaweed or whatever is under the bottom of your foot. And for heaven’s sakes be quiet and be still. You don’t want to scare all the fish away, do you?

“I love you in the morning and I love you late at night. I love you in the evening when the moon is shining bright, OH, skinnamarinkidinkidink, skinnamarinkido…”

*                                  *                                   *                                      *

Enough already!

Be quiet and be still. And pay attention! Always my admonition. I don’t think I ever learned that to his satisfaction. I never liked fishing because of that rule. Be still! Don’t move. That fish is going to bite any minute now. Lordy, how I wished it would, so this ordeal of being still could be over with. My father very soon gave up making a fisherwoman of me, just as he later gave up making a hunter of either one of us, after my sister cried all the way back to the “upcountry” farm that Thanksgiving when Daddy took both of us out to hunt squirrels. I of course was eager to show him I was no sissy, but my sister wailed so loudly that neither of us were ever invited to go hunting with him again.

C’mon, Sue. You were just as sick over that poor little squirrel as I was. You were just too busy schmoozing daddy to let on. Not that he was fooled by your act, not one bit. You were supposed to be the boy, remember. He almost named you Edwina anyway. By the time I came along he’d given up on sons and made do with the two of us.

This trip, though, wasn’t about hunting, or even fishing. It was about crabbing. Daddy had bartered a few days in this family house on Perdido Bay, and we were allowed to check the crab traps as part of the bargain. Anything in them was ours to enjoy. That‘s how I ended up with a dream, or maybe a real experience – who can say for sure? – of being chased by live crabs when I was two or four or six. Young enough to be barefoot and barebreasted in the sunshine and just old enough to be terrified of these snapping, seething, foaming and slimy creatures that Daddy brought in the house for mother to cook.

The crab scene is real. Either that or I’ve heard you tell it so many times I think it happened. And you’re right about Daddy getting us up at dawn to go have some “experience” whether we wanted to or not. Must be why I’m so hard to get going in the mornings, now. A reaction to being bounced out with “Good morning, merry sunshine!” when we weren’t interested in anything but sleeping.

Mother must have been terrified of those crabs also. She’d never cooked much of anything before marrying my father. Boiling water was about the extent of her culinary expertise. She boiled water for these crabs in great big kettles that sat on the wood-fired stove, a great black thing as I recall. There may have been a gas stove as well, and I seem to remember a big propane tank outside, but I don’t have an image of that stove in my mind. Probably because it was way too tall for me to see the top of, and I’d have been shooed away from anything so dangerous as a stove when it was at its most interesting, cooking something.

Sue, the woodstove you’re thinking about is the potbellied one at the house on the bay. This house didn’t have a wood stove. You’re getting mixed up again. And the beaded boards were in the bay house. The propane tank and the pump you were right about, though.

I remember those crabs, though – mainly the ones that somehow wriggled out of the pot and landed on the floor, with the express purpose, it seemed to my childhood mind, of coming after me.

 In my highly imaginative child’s mind, those crabs chased me through many nightmares. It soon developed into a fear of walking on the bare floor at all – and might have been intentionally enhanced by my father‘s tales of people he knew that had lost fingers and toes to these terrifying crabs. He was good for that – telling me things that now sound way over the top—that we believed at the time as though they were gospel.

            The image of crabs with giant blue claws chasing me surfaces again each time I see that photograph of Daddy in the hammock.

            The crabs weren’t the only scary thing about that beach trip. Don’t you remember the armadillo that was under the porch? And that silly bird dog of daddy’s, Sputnik, howling to beat the band at that armadillo. You’re imaginative all right. Imagining all sorts of stuff that never happened.And surely you haven’t forgotten the big event of that trip, when Barbie Smith stepped on a fish hook and had to have it cut out?