At the beach......

I can't decide if my favorite part of Alabama is the mountains or the beach. This week J. and I are in Gulf Shores and memories of summers spent here while growing up are flooding me. I don't know if there was a summer when my family didn't spend some time at the beach -- summer vacations spent in the sand and surf from morning to night. And there were always so many people with us. If it wasn't another family it was the aunts and the cousins. Looking back, I was always in a group of people as I was growing up. Maybe that's why I now value private space so much?

So many of those summer vacations found my mom and her sisters (along with all the cousins) renting a couple of cabins at the coast where we spent gloriously long lazy days doing pretty much what we wanted when we wanted. Schedules were suspended. Then on the weekends my dad and the uncles would come down. For a couple of days sleeping spaces for us cousins were moved around and bubble bath and perfume wafted in the air as aunts and uncles rotated who was going out to dinner with who was baby sitting. More music and laughter filled the air when my dad and the uncles were there.

Then, late on Sundays, my dad and the uncles would head back to B'ham. and things would get back to normal for my mom and me and my brothers and my aunts and cousins. Days filled with aunts napping, cousins fighting, group trips to the water, sand castle building, shell collecting, and sunburned shoulders. Then as the sun set and the sky filled with stars, the smell of soap drifted behind our group of freshly scrubbed cousins as we made our way to the store for ice cream cones. Bedtime found the older cousins scaring the crap out of us younger cousins with ghost stories. I can still remember falling asleep smiling as the aunts were fussing at the older cousins for scaring us younger ones.

Those were the good old days.

Have you put away your white patent leather shoes?

It's after Labor Day.

....If you grew up in the South, you'd know what I mean.