Going to the Ocean with my Sisters

Sometimes you just need to get away from it all. Also, sometimes your mom is craving some home-alone time. These are the reasons why my sisters and I spent most of the week at a little Airbnb by the ocean.

Amy had to work until Thursday, but Jenny and I can take our work with us, so the two of us left on Tuesday. It was a great day. First, because were going to the coast (of course), but also because that morning, Jenny got accepted into one of the grad school programs she’d applied to. Fully funded and with a generous stipend. We danced around, yelling with joy.

We arrived at our Airbnb, put all our groceries away, and explored the place. As soon as I walked into the kitchen I got déjà vu. “Hey Jenny,” I said. “What does this kitchen floor remind you of?”

“I don’t know,” said Jenny. “It looks a little familiar but I don’t know why.”

“It’s the same flooring that’s in the playhouse!” I said. I don’t think Jenny was quite as moved by this as I was. I distinctly remember the day that Dad, Amy and I went to pick out playhouse flooring, but Jenny wasn’t even born yet back then.

Jenny built a makeshift desk in her bedroom out of a nightstand and an end table. I decided that I’d work at the little desk in the living room.

It was a bit wobbly. A decorative glass ball rolled off and fell to the floor with a crash. Oops! It didn’t break, though, thankfully. I guess those glass balls they sell in all the coastal tourist shops are a lot hardier than they look. But just to be safe, I fenced them in with coasters so they wouldn’t roll off again.

We made pasta and fish for supper, and ate it on the couch while watching television. “I feel exactly like those worldly people the preachers used to preach against,” I said. “Remember how they’d say that the world was going down the tubes because no one sat down for family dinners anymore? They’d just eat in front of the TV?”

After our show was over we did the dishes, marveling at how easy it was to clean up when it was just the two of us in the house. But that is when we ran into the Problem of the Onion.

That is, we had a partially cut-up onion, and nothing to put it in.

I feel like we have this problem every time we go to an Airbnb. We bring food, we cook, and then we look at our leftovers and half-used onions and think, “what do I put this in?” Because we rarely think ahead to bring Tupperware containers or Ziploc bags.

Jenny searched the cupboards for saran wrap, and found nothing. “Here, we can put it in this,” I said, picking up a crock from the counter. It was sort-of like a cookie jar.

“But isn’t it kind-of gross and dusty?” Jenny asked dubiously, while I examined it to make sure there was nothing inside it already.

“Not anymore,” I said, plunging it into my dish water.

So Jenny had no choice but to put the onion in the crock, even though she thought it was a very weird place to put an onion.

Wednesday it poured rain, but we still visited the ocean since it was just across the street. There was kind-of a maze of driftwood and soggy places you had to cross before you made it to the beach. I took my camera along and snagged a shot of Jenny leaping from one log to another.

Mostly, it was a relaxing week. Of course we had to work or (in Jenny’s case) do online school, but when we weren’t doing that we read books, walked on the beach, or watched Netflix.

Here’s a kind-of funny story: We don’t have Netflix at home, because we already have Amazon Prime and we’re too cheap to pay for all the streaming services. But in vacation rentals, the TV always seems to be signed into some random person’s Netflix account. Presumably, some previous Airbnb guest who signed in and forgot to sign out again when they left.

So, there are certain shows that we only watch when we’re on vacation. (How very Beachy Amish of us, hahaha)

My cousin Dolly told me that the best Asian drama she’d seen was one called Accidentally In Love, on Netflix. So last summer when us girls took a coast trip after Matt’s wedding, we watched a few episodes. Then, when our family took our Christmas trip to the coast, we watched a few more episodes. And finally, on this girl’s trip, we watched even more episodes. (The show, I should note, is nothing earth-shattering, just charming and silly.)

Amy came on Thursday. “Hey Emily,” she said. “Did you notice anything about the kitchen floor?”

Then we reminisced about buying floor tile for the playhouse. Funny that this was such a distinct memory for both of us. We were really young and poor then, but Dad built us a playhouse from old pallets and we got to go to Home Depot or Jerry’s or one of those places and pick out flooring. It was just those cheap linoleum tiles that they use in college classrooms and stuff. But picking them out for our own little playhouse was exciting.

Friday I decided to write a blog post about the trip, and I tried to remember if anything funny had happened so far. Jenny was in class, so I asked Amy.

“Hmm, well, Jenny fell off a log yesterday.”

“She did?” I was in a zoom call at the time, so I hadn’t gone down to the beach with them.

“Also, Jenny said something really funny yesterday, but I don’t remember what it was.”

“What did you say that was funny, Jenny?” I asked, later, when she was out of class.

“I said, ‘This house is not well-lit, but it sure does have a lot of hooks,’” said Jenny.

She was right. There was an extraordinary amount of hooks in the house. My room had two rows of hooks for hanging clothes on, and Jenny and Amy’s room also had two rows of hooks, plus another hook by the door. Downstairs there were big hooks by the front door for coats and hats, and little hooks for keys. The kitchen had hooks for pots and pans, only there were three times as many hooks as pans. And another set of little hooks for potholders. And hooks by the back door.

Oh well. It just made the place charming and quirky I guess. And it is nice to have places to hang all your things.

The only other funny incident Jenny could remember was that one day, as we’d walked on the beach, we’d found a bouquet of abandoned carnations. Maybe, we decided, someone had proposed, gotten rejected, and then, in frustration, tossed the bouquet aside. Do people have flowers when they propose? We picked a few of them out of the sand, went home, and put them in a vase.

Saturday we did some exploring, and Amy took pictures which I then stole for this blog post.

I just realized that I don’t have a single picture with Amy in it. Probably because she was the one behind the camera in these pictures. I promise she was there too, haha.

Sunday was our last day, and when we went to the beach, the surf was higher than I’d ever seen it. The places between the log maze were all completely flooded, and the logs looked very slippery. But even if we had made it over, there wasn’t really any beach because the waves kept flooding over it.

We went to North Jetty Beach then, intending to eat our lunch while watching the waves. But it was weirdly stressful. The surf was high and full of logs that were drifting and bobbing about in the water. A huge sneaker wave came in, and we scrambled up a sand dune while a couple on the jetty had to beat a hasty retreat.

But what was really stressful was watching other people, who presumably hadn’t seen the previous sneaker wave, start walking way out onto the jetty. Yeah, no thanks–I came to watch the ocean, not watch people get swept into the ocean. We packed up our stuff and left.

(And yes, before I wrote this post I googled to make sure no one had actually gotten swept into the ocean that day. It seems that no one did. Presumably, everyone kept a close enough eye on the ocean to run away from any sneaker waves, but still. Stressful much?)

That, then, was a strange end to our trip to the coast. We drove home and took long naps. I suppose we’ll do it all again someday, hopefully on a day when the ocean is just a little bit tamer. After all, at some point I’d like to find out what happens next to the characters in Accidentally in Love.